Bonus Chapter 1

Crosshair

Set before the events of Contingency

Smoke burned Crosshair's lungs.

He held it deep in his chest, embracing the burn. Glad for the pain. It was almost enough to mask the heavy weight that had sat in his chest for the past five months.

Five months. How had it already been so long since Saedii and Omega had gone missing?

It felt like only seconds had passed. Like his life didn't count unless the girls were there to share it with him.

For years, he'd been a soldier. Had measured his days by shots made and missions completed. But sometime in the past year, he'd begun to measure it by the chime of Omega's laughter. By the flash of challenge in Saedii's eyes before she said something clever.

In the past five months, there had been nothing. No laughter. No comments that had him fighting a smile.

Slowly, he blew out the smoke. It curled purple in the air before him, dark though with a slight iridescent sheen. The bartender at the end of the bar turned and glared at him.

"Hey, pal!" the man squeaked in a high voice. "There's no smoking in here."

Crosshair ignored him. The drathroot had given him a pleasant buzz. Had made that terrible homesick feeling in his chest hazy.

It wouldn't go entirely. He'd tried everything to make that ache in his chest vanish, even for just a damn moment. But it was always there, as insistent as a scar that never healed right. Still just as sharp as that first day.

A few seats away, another man sat. This one was green and with a yellow tattoo over one eye. His blunt nose scrunched at Crosshair's smoke that curled in the air around them, mingling with spilled hitti and ergas. The smell reminded him of Cid's bar on Ord Mantell – though that reminder only served to piss him off even more as he thought of that traitor.

"Hey!" the bartender was standing in front of him now, glaring. It lost its effect as the bartender's head didn't even clear the bar. He looked more like a stuffed lula, and about as dangerous. "Didn't you hear me?"

"I heard you," Crosshair said. His voice was gravelly. Roughened by the drathroot.

"You need to put that out!"

He turned a baleful look to the little creature. "Why don't you make me?"

A terrified little squeak escaped from its black lips. Quickly, it scurried down to help other patrons at the other end of the bar.

Coward. How that little plushie had survived as a bartender in Coruscant's lower levels was beyond him. Crosshair hadn't even needed to flash his blaster to get him to back off.

Ash danced across his tongue as he took another drag. It was cloyingly sweet and spicy. Burning his eyes and nose as well as his throat.

All of the Batch had found different ways to cope with the girls' disappearances. Cross had turned to drathroot and drythus – the easiest vices. Wrecker picked fights at every new place they checked out. Echo had buried himself in comms chatter, and spent most days in the corner, plugged into the scomp with glazed eyes as he listened. Tech leaned heavily on Phee.

And Hunter...

Hunter had been their driving fire. The spark that pushed them to keep going. He barely slept or ate and spent each day pouring over maps of every star system. As if he thought something would speak to him. Some clue that they'd missed would suddenly make sense.

It was pointless. All of it. And unsustainable. After a few more months of this, none of them would be functioning much better than –

The chair beside him yanked out with a scrape of metal. Crosshair suppressed a sigh as Wrecker collapsed into the chair, shouting, "Hey! Can I get some hithii down here?"

"What are you doing here?" Crosshair snarled. The last thing he felt like doing was talking. In fact, he'd retreated to this grungy little bar a few minutes from the spaceport to get away from them.

"I just came to get a drink," Wrecker said as he accepted his glass from the shaking bartender, whose wide brown eyes took in Wrecker's bulk with apparent alarm.

"Go somewhere else."

"Stuff it, Cross." In one motion, Wrecker downed his hithii and rapped two knuckles on the bar top for more.

An amber glass of drythus sat at Crosshair's elbow. Holding his drathroot joint between two fingers, he held his glass up to his lips with the other. This time, the burn was different – not like fire on his tongue, but battery acid.

Purple skin rimmed Wrecker's scarred eye. He'd taken a hell of a hit from a Gamorean at their last stop, following a lead on Hemlock. So far, Rex hadn't had much intel on the mysterious Imperial doctor.

There hadn't been any leads on Saedii.

He took another sip, chasing down the first. At this rate, he'd be drunk in thirty minutes. Maybe if he kept going, he'd get drunk enough to get some actual sleep. Maker knows he hadn't had any real sleep in months.

"Tech went to meet Phee," Wrecker said, filling the silence as the bartender refilled his glass.

"Good for him." Crosshair puffed on his joint again. "I hope he brought protection."

Wrecker didn't laugh. Months ago, he would have found that funny, but there didn't seem to be anything that amused his little brother these days.

"Hunter said she might have a lead. Mentioned something about the Outer Rim again."

"We've checked out a dozen of her leads by now, most of which were in the Outer Rim. They never lead to anything."

"You never know. This one might."

Wrecker was still optimistic. Any hope that Crosshair might have had died weeks ago.

Hemlock and his Advanced Science Division was one of the best kept secrets in the galaxy. Finding any shred of usable information had proved more difficult than any mission they'd encountered so far. All they'd found were breadcrumbs, and no direct mentions of Omega.

And Saedii...

There had been nothing so far on the mysterious Inquisitors. Nothing on Pong Krell or Kalth Apperion – the little shit that had taken her. Nothing at all.

They didn't even know if she was alive.

Drythus warmed his mouth as he drank, trying hard not to think about it. But Saedii's face flooded his mind all the same.

Hunter insisted that she was alive. He'd been convinced that the puddle of her blood proved such. Echo, too, had been confident, relaying information from General Skywalker as they conducted their own mission of hunting down Inquisitors.

But Crosshair wasn't sure that he believed that.

Saedii was too young and too small. That kind of trauma would have been enough to kill a Clone twice her age and height. Unless there had been medical care waiting for her on the Inquisitors' ship, she'd have bled out.

As dark as that thought was, Crosshair wasn't sure what would be worse – to die or to be captured by the Empire. And he didn't know which fate he wished for the girl that had become family to him – to be alive and tortured, or have already met a painful death. Neither seemed the kinder fate.

"We'll find them, Cross," Wrecker insisted, reading the flash of emotion Crosshair wasn't able to hide. "We won't give up on them."

"Don't be naïve," Crosshair snapped.

The truth was, though, that as much as he pretended otherwise, Crosshair did still have hope. Just a shred, but it was enough that it kept him going. That it made him return to their ship time and again, after every failed lead, to go and track down another.

He wanted to find both of them. Wanted to free Omega and give her the childhood that none of them had ever gotten. And he wanted to find Saedii and apologize for the last things he'd said to her. For ever making her doubt her place in this family.

Wrecker puffed up. "I'm not! I'm not giving up on them! I never will, even if it takes the rest of our lives."

Crosshair paused, glass at his lips. And for one brief, terrible moment, he wondered what that would be like. What would happen if they spent the rest of their lives searching for their two lost members.

He imagined them all, grey-haired and with lined faces, flying through every star system. Still hunting for just the barest scrap of information – a name, a place, anything.

Then, he imagined them all dying off, one-by-one. Echo first, since he was the oldest. Then Wrecker and Tech. Hunter, stubborn bastard that he was, holding on to the last minute. All of them, gone, until it was only Crosshair that remained. Until he was alone in his crusade, searching the stars with an empty ship full of too many memories.

Could he really spend the rest of his life searching? Really throw away the years he had left just for a chance of getting Omega and Saedii back.

He knew the answer almost immediately.

Yes, he would.

Even the grey-haired Crosshair in his mind was unwilling to give up. Jaded and cynical as Crosshair was now, he would search until his final breath. Until his body finally gave up and he could search no longer. And even then, he would come back as a ghost to haunt the stars, always searching for his girls. For the family that was taken away from him.

As much as it pained him to continue this fruitless search, he would never be able to stop.

Their comms beeped then. Hunter's voice barked in Crosshair's ear, "Cross, Wrecker – get back to the ship."

"Did Phee find something?" Wrecker asked hopefully. How he managed to hold onto so much hope baffled Crosshair.

Crosshair took one last long pull on his drathroot, sucking the cinders all the way down to the end. When it was nothing but a nub in his fingers, he ground it into ash against the bar top.

"A contact told her about a secret facility on Wayland," Hunter's voice said, and it had that same hopeful fire that Wrecker's did. Insufferable, the two of them. "A place called Mount Tantiss."

Mount Tantiss. Right. Like this was going to yield anything of true value.

Wrecker smiled fiercely and knocked back the rest of his drink, tossing some credits on the bar. Buzzed, reluctant, and more than a little annoyed, Crosshair finished his drink and followed.

It wasn't like they were going to find anything anyways.