Chapter 112 · The Grave Between Stars

Hyperspace had never felt this quiet.

The Faded Glory slipped through the blue corridors with her running lights dimmed, primary systems throttled down to a low hum, like the ship itself knew they were heading toward something that demanded silence. Even Eli, usually soothed by the rhythmic pulse of the hyperdrive, found himself listening to the absence of sound more than the presence of it.

No music. No idle chatter. Even Tee kept his processing to soft ticks.

Stent sat at the co-pilot’s station, posture carved into stone, Kallus’ coordinates hovering in a faint projection before him. He’d been reviewing them for hours — not doubting the data, but measuring every decimal, every line of orbital decay, every thermal shift logged years ago.

Eli glanced over, breaking the hush gently. “All right?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve read that line twenty times.”

“Twenty-seven,” Stent corrected, eyes never leaving the numbers. “They are consistent.”

Eli leaned back. “So we trust it.”

Stent didn’t respond for several seconds. Then, very quietly: “Yes.”

Eli felt something in his chest unclench — not hope, not relief, just the release of a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding since they left Lothal’s atmosphere. He watched Stent’s face in the dim cockpit light, the blue glow of hyperspace rippling across sharp features.

“You’re certain this is the right sector?” Eli asked.

“Certain enough,” Stent said. “The wreckage could not disperse far. And the Empire’s attempt to catalog it preserved the original coordinates of drift.”

Eli nodded. “Good.”

Silence settled again.

Silence that tasted like memory. Like anticipation. Like walking into a cemetery where the names on the gravestones aren’t yours, but the loss still finds you.

Stent reached up and dimmed the cockpit illumination even further.

Eli frowned. “Why?”

“Respect,” Stent said simply.

Eli didn’t ask for clarification. Didn’t need to.

The Faded Glory flew on, wrapped in hyperspace’s blue hush. A ship holding its breath.

A crew holding the weight of what they might find.

Stent folded the projection away, resting one hand lightly on the console, fingers still as if listening through metal. “We will arrive shortly,” he murmured.

Eli stared at the swirling blur outside the viewport.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I know.”

Neither spoke again.

Hyperspace thinned. The blue corridor wavered.

And the Faded Glory moved toward a field of ghosts.

Realspace unfolded around them in a slow, heavy reveal.

One moment the view beyond the canopy was only darkness and distant starlight, the next, shapes emerged from that darkness like colossal shadows rising from deep water.

The Faded Glory drifted forward on minimal thrusters, her engines throttled to a faint murmur, careful not to disturb the stillness ahead.

And then Eli saw it.

The wreckfield.

The viewport filled with shadows. Not natural ones. Not the drifting quiet of empty space.

But shapes — broken, jagged, impossibly huge — suspended in a vast, terrible calm.

Hull plates the size of buildings. Twisted girders tangled like ribs of some colossal carcass. A shattered bridge tower drifting on its side, windows blown out, metal peeled away like skin.

The wreckage did not orbit. It floated.

Silent. Stagnant. As if the vacuum had chosen not to move it anymore.

Eli’s throat tightened. “Stars…”

Even Tee went silent, photoreceptor dimming to a respectful pulse.

Stent’s hands hovered over the controls, not touching, as though even piloting felt intrusive here.

“This…” Eli whispered, “this is a graveyard.”

Stent did not correct him.

He simply adjusted their vector by a fraction, guiding them deeper into the field.

The Faded Glory passed the torn remains of what must have been an escort frigate — the whole bow section evaporated, the stern curling inward in a melted ruin. A light caught on something glinting against the hull: fragments of armor, frozen bodies drifting like small silver flecks.

Eli closed his eyes for a moment. Just a moment.

Stent’s voice, soft and low: “Keep sensors passive. No emissions.”

“Already set,” Eli murmured.

They drifted further in.

A crawler carrier—split clean down the spine. A cluster of shattered TIE fighters—wings floating separately like lost feathers. A swath of debris that looked less like wreckage and more like ash suspended in the cold.

Eli leaned slightly forward, eyes narrowing, breath shallow. “This was the Seventh,” he said. Not dramatic. Not emotional. Just truth. “This was the flagship’s escort formation.”

Stent swallowed hard. “He was here.”

Eli didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.

The graveyard said it for him.

The Faded Glory glided through the field like a trespasser in a holy place, disturbing nothing, leaving no trace.

And ahead, deeper in the dark, something larger loomed— a broken, curved section of hull, unmistakable in color and cut.

A vast remnant of a Star Destroyer.

The galaxy’s dead, caught forever in the cold between stars.

Stent guided the Faded Glory forward with movements so careful they barely registered as motion at all. The ship drifted through the wreckfield like a respectful visitor, not a trespasser, engines murmuring under his touch.

Eli powered up the spectral scanners, fingers slow and deliberate, the way one opens a sealed archive, not a machine.

The first sweep rippled across the displays.

Blue light. Scrolling numbers. Silence.

A massive hull plate floated past the viewport — a slab as tall as a five story building, blackened around the edges, torn down the middle as if ripped by a force no physics table had prepared Eli for.

He ran the scan again, verifying alloy composition.

“Stent,” he said quietly.

Stent didn’t look away from the debris ahead. “Readings.”

“Titanium-aduranium composite. Vanadium traces. Same pattern as Corellian yards.”

Stent’s jaw tightened a fraction.

Eli zoomed in on a secondary cluster of fragments — smaller, sharp-edged, identical to panels from a Star Destroyer’s dorsal plating. The microfracture map populated across the console with crisp blue lines.

Recognition hit like a breath punched out of him.

“That’s her,” Eli whispered. “That’s Class I. Exact spacing. Exact distribution. Could be the Chimaera..”

Stent slowed the ship further, almost to stillness.

His voice dropped into something that wasn’t quite emotion, but wasn’t its absence either:

“A match.”

The next fragment drifted slowly into view, tumbling end over end through the silent graveyard.

At first it looked like any other piece of torn durasteel—twisted plating, scorched along one edge, the inner reinforcement ribs exposed where the explosion had ripped it free.

Then it rotated a little farther.

A faded streak of white paint emerged across the battered surface.

Another.

Curving.

Eli leaned closer to the console, his pulse quickening.

The lines weren't random blast marks. They were the remains of a painted emblem, weathered by years in vacuum but still unmistakable.

The stylized chimera.

Most of the creature had been torn away with the missing section of hull. Only part of one foreleg and the sweep of a wing remained, ghostly against the Imperial gray plating.

Eli felt his throat tighten.

"No doubt," he whispered. "Ventral hull plating... beneath the forward hangar."

He had walked above that section hundreds of times without ever thinking about the artwork hidden beneath the ship's belly. Maintenance crews had seen it. Dock workers had seen it. Pilots approaching from below had seen it.

Now it floated alone among thousands of anonymous fragments.

"This is the Chimaera," he said quietly. "There's no doubt at all."

Beside him, Stent followed the drifting wreckage in silence, watching the faded remains of the emblem disappear into the darkness.

"He was here," he said softly.

They drifted deeper into the field.

Torn support struts curled like ribs. A collapsed hangar catwalk. A shredded TIE rack still holding a half-vaporized cockpit.

Bodies, too — small glints in the dark, frozen silhouettes that drifted like constellations broken loose.

Eli’s scanner pinged again.

“Alloy match confirmed across multiple samples.” His voice wavered. “Stent… the whole fleet broke here.”

Stent’s hands tightened on the controls — just a breath, just enough to betray the fracture beneath his calm.

“He was here,” he repeated, quieter this time.

Eli stared at the scatter of wrecks ahead — the shredded spines of Destroyers, the melted scars on what once had been command towers, the burned-out skeletons of machines and men.

A graveyard. A battlefield. A truth written in floating ruin.

“And he vanished with them,” Eli whispered.

Stent didn’t correct him.

For the first time, there was nothing to correct.