Some of this echoes “Battle Over Odessen” for how Keel’ath handles the news his sons have gone MIA. It takes place sometime after “The Middleman”, but Vette is chilly towards Brant once again, due to a fight that took place offscreen that I have yet to write.
I made the decision to use the crew’s last names here, a difficult choice in any kind of fiction where both names are given. Kellaro is the one exception because he doesn’t have a last name, as Mako doesn’t have one, and Keel’ath left his behind long before the twins were born.
Author’s Note
“Wait, where’s Kellaro?”
Jorgan just eyed Brant and said nothing as he carried Dorne past, one arm of hers slung around his broad Cathar shoulders. Brant stood by — was forced to, as M1-4X rumbled past, also carrying a trooper in its arms. Once the droid was out of the way, Brant tailed the Cathar, snapping:
“Answer me, cat! Where is the major?”
“He fell,” the Cathar finally said, but only after he had gently laid Dorne onto one of the beds in the medical bay.
“And you survived? How is that possible?” growled Brant. Without even realizing it, his lightsaber ignited and was in his hands, and Jorgan howled in alarm and jumped back.
“This isn’t the Empire, boy!” he snapped at Brant angrily. “We don’t waste half a squad just to save the one man with rank!”
“He would have done the same for any of you,” Brant snarled, glaring at everyone else in the bay. Even Dorne wasn’t meeting his eyes.
“And so he did,” said Jorgan. “I didn’t do this willingly, Sith. It was an order. He stayed behind so the rest of us could get out of that deathtrap, while he distracted the enemy. It’d be a dishonor to his memory to go back now.”
“To his memory? He’s not dead! I would have felt it–”
Jorgan eyed him. “No, he was not the last time I saw him, but it’s only a matter of time. They brought walkers. No ground troop, no Sith, has ever stood alone against walkers.”
Brant raised his lightsaber. “Then I’ll be the first.”
“I forbid it,” said the Cathar, his green eyes not leaving Brant’s. “With Major Kellaro gone, I am in command.”
“I am not part of your crew,” Brant spat, “as you so artfully pointed out the moment I came aboard. Consider it a service I remove myself now.”
The other soldiers looked between them nervously. Jorgan’s eyes continued to bore into Brant, but then, abruptly, they closed, and the Cathar bent his head. “Then go. And may the Force be with you.”
“The Force will serve me,” Brant corrected him nastily, and with a swirl of his robes, he swept around and was jogging down the gangplank.
“You’re going back out there?” Vette’s startled voice greeted him suddenly from a side door. She threw down a power coupling she was trying to repair and sprinted after him. “You can’t be serious!”
Brant didn’t look at her as keyed in the command for the ship’s gangplank to extend again. “Of course not. I can’t go back to somewhere I haven’t been.”
The Twi’lek unexpectedly put herself between him and the opening hatch, and Brant stared at her.
“Get out of my way, Vette.”
“Brant, this is suicide.”
“Really? Now where have I heard that before?” he asked, cocking his head in mock ignorance. The look Vette gave him might have seared the flesh from his bones.
“This isn’t Hoth odds, or even Korriban odds,” she told him.
“Eh. How about Balmorra odds?”
“This isn’t a joke!”
“Sheesh, I don’t know why you’re so touchy,” said Brant. “I’m not ordering you to come along or anything.”
“I’m not yours to order anymore, anyway,” Vette muttered, then her expression fell. “Brant, please. Not this way. I can’t lose both of you.”
“That was almost touching.” Brant scowled at her, hesitated, then turned to face her more fully, pulling something from his robes’ sleeves. “This is for you. Call it a parting gift, if you’re so torn up inside.”
Vette took the object, blinking, and stared at it. “…it’s a commlink.”
“Yes. You remember how to use one, yes? Someone has to flag the ship when I find him, and convince that pussy-cat to land.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bridge, then hopped backwards off the gangplank, putting him out of Vette’s reach as she looked like she wanted to slap him.
Vette came to the edge and knelt, the better to maintain eye contact as the ship slowly rose into the air. “I’d better be hearing something from you in 24 hours,” she warned.
Brant smiled at her. “I’ll make it one better. You’ll hear from Kellaro himself.”
“Brant…”
“Hurry up already. Your ship’s leaving.” He took a step back as the gangplank began to rise.
Vette stood and backed away, up into the the ship, to allow the gangplank to slide back into place. “Brant… Look, I didn’t mean what I said earlier. Just sometimes…”
“Sometimes what?” He didn’t spare her a glance as he checked his belt, his lightsaber, the other commlink. All was there.
“Don’t interrupt me! Sometimes your stupid Sithy head makes me so angry!”
“Then my departure should be relaxing for you.” He glared up at her. He meant to say more, but the hatch was closing, and her face had disappeared behind it. The ship’s engines suddenly burned bright and Brant stepped back out of the way as it pushed itself into the sky. As he watched, it swung its nose around, and he could just see the tiny faces of the rest of the crew staring at him through the cockpit.
Then the engines ignited in full, and they were gone.
“So much for Republic loyalty,” Brant muttered. “At least they could have waved.”
He turned back to the battlefield. The planet’s sky was unnaturally red-brown, colored so by the smoke filling it and the red blaster fire, a near-constant glow, from beneath it. Shadowy shapes of tall walkers loomed in the darkness, spread out across the horizon line like so many sentinels. Brant knew, vaguely, the direction Havoc Squad had been deployed in, but in the premature dusk, he could make out nothing of the landscape’s features. Finding Kellaro would be like finding a single moon in a star-filled galaxy.
And while enemies were actively firing on him.
Brant was thrown to the ground as an ion beam arced just yards away, missing him and splitting the blackened husk of a crabtree with a thunder-like crack. Yuun’s cloaking device had done the job in pulling the Squad out of combat, but the Skytroopers were still seeking them, and Brant had no such device of his own.
He rolled until he felt his back press up against another crabtree and willed the Force to bring darkness closing in around him, bending the light and redirecting glimpses of himself out to all sides. Another ion cannon fired, but it hit a tree further off, and taking a deep breath, Brant crawled in the opposite direction.
It felt like hours, but it could have been minutes, as the gloom deepened into true night and the Eternal Empire’s army continued to trample the land all around him, firing on the few pockets of Alliance soldiers that had not yet retreated. Once, a walker passed just yards away, its enormous feet flattening a stand of crabtrees like they were nothing more than Dantooine grass. Despite his earlier bravado with Jorgan, Brant stayed pressed flat to the ground, not even breathing until it had fully passed.
As night blackened the battlefield, Brant closed his eyes and stretched out his senses instead, using the Force to pinpoint the droids moving around him, like blank spaces in the air, cold and empty of sentience. Once or twice, he had to divert his course, crossing the field in long zig-zagging motions to avoid their patrols. He knew he had to find Kellaro quickly, or his heat signature would soon stand out against the mud now cooling off under the gloom.
A few more paces later, and Brant rolled himself in next to the scorched husk of another walker — likely Havoc Squad’s work — and dropped his Force-cloak so that he could concentrate on his other powers. The still-smoldering engine would cover his heat signature, so long as he didn’t stand up and put the silhouette of a man against its light.
He scanned the battlefield again with his Force-sense, this time looking for lifeforms. His heart started pounding as he wondered if he would be too late. What shape was Kellaro even in? Was he dying, or simply penned up somewhere? Jorgan hadn’t said, and Brant heard Kellaro’s bitter criticisms of his recklessness again. He had wildly run out here without first gathering information about what had happened to his brother.
It didn’t matter now. He didn’t dare call Vette on the commlink until he was ready to leave, for the Skytroopers would pick up on the transmission swiftly and swarm his location. So he gripped his lightsaber hard and stilled his breathing until he was almost asleep, pushing his sense of the Force to its limits. If anyone could find his brother, it would be him. Kellaro had to be out there.
And then Brant found it. Pain, fear, loss, abandonment, so keenly felt Brant wondered why he didn’t hear sobbing with his physical ears. It could have been the imprint of any dying soldier, but the Sith pressed on it, teasing at the knot of the Force formed around it. It almost felt intentionally made, and he wondered if perhaps he wasn’t the only Force-sensitive on the battlefield, but then the cloak fell apart under his prodding, and he sensed fretful anger, the cadence of it so familiar it could’ve been his own.
Yes, that was it. Brant pierced into the emotion, ignoring the sudden cry of surprise as he rode the fury down into his brother’s mind, and then he was looking out of the major’s eyes, blinking in the dark.
“The hell is that? What the hell is that?”
Be quiet, said Brant. They’ll hear you.
“S-Sith? Get away from me!”
Brant felt the panic building in his twin’s throat, and he angrily shoved it down, so hard Kellaro’s head hit the ground and he groaned as if he had been knocked out cold. Then Brant was forcing open his brother’s eyelids, trying to peer around into the gloom and mark a position. There was something huge looming over him, but it was stationary, lifeless. A walker?
Then Brant felt the terrible pain arcing up one of his brother’s legs, the other curiously absent of sensation. He bullied his brother’s fading consciousness to turn and to look, to confront that terrible knowledge, and then he saw it.
Kellaro was out there, still alive, but pinned under the bulk of a massive walker.