Chapter 66 · The Empire’s door

The astromech sat in the maintenance bay, silent. Its dome was scorched, panels cracked, a spiderweb of carbon scoring down one side. The small indicator on its base blinked red, then green, then nothing — the flicker of a system deciding whether to wake.

Eli had left it in a safety cradle, power feed isolated and its comm link disabled by a clamp. That droid wasn't going anywhere, nor was it going to transmit anything at all.

“Charging only,” he’d said. “No uplink, no network.”

Now it sat under the low hum of the Faded Glory’s lights, mute and unknowable.

In the cockpit, Stent monitored the empty system ahead. “Radiation levels fluctuate. The reactor may erupt again anytime.”

Eli ran one last check on the jump coordinates, eyes flicking over the nav display. Everything was clean—vectors stable, field alignment steady. He almost keyed the final confirmation before a thought struck him.

He hesitated, called up an old overlay from Thrawn’s archive, and let the classified lattice bloom across the chart.

Thin white lines appeared where none should exist, threading through the system like hidden veins.

His stomach dropped.

“Stent,” he said quietly, “look at this.”

The Chiss leaned closer.

Eli zoomed in, the intersection glowing faintly over their current position. “We’re sitting on top of a Navy corridor exit point.”

Stent’s eyes narrowed. “The Imperial Navy private paths. You have spoken of them before.”

“Yeah,” Eli said, his voice low. “And we’re standing beside a door we shouldn’t know exists.”

The sensor alarm broke the calm — a hard, repeating tone.
Eli straightened. “Incoming energy spike. Localized mass shift—”

Before he could finish, a small burst of blue light ripped across the starfield ahead. Space folded outward, the kind of ripple only hyperspace re-entry could make — but narrow, too precise for a freighter.

A drone emerged, small, dark, Imperial design. It glided silently for a moment, then released its payload — a sphere the size of a man’s torso, bristling with antennae and faint red lights.

“Probe droid,” Eli breathed.

The thing ignited its thrusters and began scanning the void with wide mechanical sweeps.

Stent’s voice dropped to a whisper. “It is tracing hyperspace residue. Ours.”

Eli swore under his breath. “They’ve mapped this route. They’re watching the corridor for unauthorized jumps.”

“The sanction on our license remains active,” Stent said calmly. “If they cross-reference our transponder—”

“They’ll have us impounded and questioned before dinner.”

Eli’s pulse kicked hard.

Stent’s hands were already on the controls. “Prepare to jump.”

Eli hesitated just long enough to glance at the nav map. “If we take the obvious route, they’ll track it.”

“Then take the opposite.”

Eli smirked. “You really are getting predictable.”

“Consistency is survival,” Stent said.

The drone rotated, red optics brightening as it locked onto them. A beam lanced out, invisible but felt — the passive scan hitting their hull.

Eli’s voice tightened. “They’re sweeping for registry tags.”

“Time?”

“Twenty seconds.”

“Jump,” Stent said.

The Faded Glory’s engines thrummed to life. The stars stretched as the ship threw itself forward, light bending, time folding — and the system vanished behind them.

The transition hit hard; for a heartbeat, everything flickered — lights, instruments, even gravity. Then hyperspace stabilized, blue corridors sliding past the canopy.

Eli slumped back, breath catching up with him. “Guess we’re smugglers now.”

Stent adjusted the readouts with clinical precision. “Then we will smuggle efficiently.”

Eli chuckled, but the sound was short-lived. The image of the drone stayed with him — not the probe itself, but the door it had come through.

The hidden lanes on Thrawn’s old map. The silent droid’s warning.

Don’t call for help.

Someone, somewhere, had used the Empire’s forgotten roads and paid the price with their lives.

The stars had barely steadied from the last jump when the alarm sounded. A sharp double tone, low enough to make the air feel thinner.

Eli was already halfway out of his seat when Stent spoke. “Pursuit signature,” he said. “Vector consistent with Imperial recon craft.”

Eli’s hand froze over the console. “Time to intercept?”

“Twenty minutes, at current speed. Their course aligns precisely with our exit vector.”

Eli muttered a curse. “They followed the jump residue.”

“Predictable.”

He slid into the pilot’s chair, bringing up the sensor feed. The signal was faint but distinct—a narrow spike of energy following in their wake, accelerating.

“They’re good,” Eli said. “Corvette-class by the size of the signature. Light armor, fast. Probably a recon detachment from that probe we dodged when we jumped.”

“The Empire’s curiosity extends beyond protocol,” Stent said.

Eli’s jaw tightened. “They’re not hunting us yet. But they’re learning our trail.”

“Then we remain unreadable.”

Eli tapped through the navigational data, overlaying Thrawn’s old Navy grid atop the civilian charts. The blue lines of the known corridors shimmered faintly against the ghost-white traces of restricted routes. Their position sat neatly between both — the place no one was supposed to be.

“They’ll expect us to jump on the civilian side,” Eli said. “So we’ll do the opposite. We’ll head rimward for a micro-jump, then spin off the vector before they can triangulate.”

Stent regarded him quietly. “Your last improvisation placed us beside an Imperial corridor.”

“That one worked,” Eli said.

“For now.”

The ship’s hum deepened as Stent adjusted power to the engines. The Faded Glory—sturdy, wide-bellied, and still bearing the neat patchwork scars of their last repairs—responded briskly.

Eli checked the navcomp again, hands moving faster now. “If my calculations are compromised, we’ll need a second set ready to go the moment we drop. I’m programming two alternates.”

“Efficiency through redundancy,” Stent said.

“Old Imperial training dies hard.”

“Imperial habits,” Stent corrected. “Training implies obedience.”

Eli smirked. “You’d know.”

The Chiss didn’t rise to it. “Prepare your routes, Vanto. We will test your efficiency.”

Eli nodded and leaned over the console, eyes flicking between the green blips of their ship and the distant echo of the corvette closing in. The math steadied him. Speed. Distance. Velocity curves. The calm precision of numbers that didn’t lie.

Behind them, the Faded Glory’s bulkheads creaked softly as the engines climbed toward their limits. The hum filled the bridge like a heartbeat.

“They’ll reach visual range soon,” Stent said.

“Then it’s a good thing I like being early.”

He keyed the course change into the console. “When I say now, cut the engines to half for three seconds. Then full thrust. It’ll make our exhaust trail blur.”

Stent’s hands rested on the controls. “On your mark.”

Eli glanced at the distance gauge. “Now.”

The Faded Glory shuddered, its engines dropping to a low growl, then roaring back to life. The sensor feed spiked—the corvette’s signal wavered, its trajectory stumbling.

“They’ve lost partial lock,” Stent reported.

“Good. Let’s make that permanent.”

“Next jump’s short. Just enough to break their pattern. Then we hide.”

Eli keyed in the new micro jump coordinates, close enough to not to require extensive calculations, within the long range gravimetric sensors, but not fully into hyperspace, the starlight outside twisting slightly as the hyperdrive charged. That was one of Thrawn’s favorite tactics: the micro jump. Performing these on a small ship like the Faded Glory was almost easy -doable, let’s say. But with an ISD was a different tale, it had require months and months of intensive training to perform it as precisely as the Grand Admiral had required.

“From what you call hiding,” Stent said, “the Empire calls recalculating.”

Eli smiled thinly. “Then let’s make their math hurt.”

The stars stretched, blue light swallowing the cockpit. The Faded Glory vanished into the hyperspace for a brief lapse — way behind them, the corvette followed, still hunting the echo of a ship it hadn’t yet learned to fear.

The Faded Glory tore out of that almost-hyperspace into a wash of pale light. The stars steadied, and the sensor grid filled with static — the afterimage of a ship running too hard, too fast.

Eli was already moving before the transition settled. “They’ll track our last jump vector,” he said. “We need noise — something for them to chase that isn’t us.”

Stent adjusted their trajectory, calm as ever. “Define ‘noise.’”

“Anything that talks louder than we do.”

He opened the maintenance compartment beneath the nav console and pulled out a small cylindrical drone — one of the service units they’d salvaged from Laro’s hangar. The thing was dented and missing half its stabilizers, but its signal core still worked.

“Old maintenance drone,” Eli said. “Still has an operational transponder suite.”

Stent raised a brow. “And you intend to volunteer it for deception.”

“Exactly. I’ll splice our old registry into it. The one from before the renewal Laro sent.”

“Impersonation,” Stent said. “Effective.”

“Illegal,” Eli countered, smirking. “But effective.”

He worked fast. The drone’s casing came apart with a hiss of static discharge, exposing a tangle of wiring that looked like a schematic’s nightmare.

Eli stripped two leads, patched in a loop from the communications relay, and burned the ship’s signature code into its transmitter.

“Transponder’s cloned,” he said. “When we dump it, it’ll look like the Faded Glory broke down mid-jump. If the corvette’s running pursuit algorithms, it’ll follow the beacon instead of us.”

“Provided they do not visually confirm,” Stent said.

“Then we make sure they can’t. We hide before they can confirm the sensor readings or have visuals.”

Eli gestured toward the viewport. Ahead of them hung a nebula — a wide smear of violet and silver dust, luminous against the dark. Its edges shimmered with electrical discharge, the kind of natural interference that made sensors useless.

Stent frowned. “Unstable.”

“Perfect.”

He carried the drone to the airlock, its shell humming faintly. “Dumping it now.”

“Trajectory?”

“Short arc. We’ll make it look like a drift.”

The airlock cycled; the drone shot out into the void, stabilizers flickering. Its transponder blinked once, twice, and settled into a steady pulse — broadcasting the Faded Glory’s old signature as it drifted toward the nebula’s edge.

Eli watched the signal on his monitor, the faint echo splitting into two separate readings — theirs and the decoy. “There. Let’s see if they take the bait.”

Stent adjusted the controls. “Then we proceed into the storm.”

The ship turned toward the nebula, the violet haze swelling until it filled the viewport. The first tremors hit as they crossed the outer edge — static crawling across the hull, sensors flickering.

Eli braced a hand on the console. “Gravitic interference’s climbing. Feels like flying through soup.”

“Maintain course,” Stent said. His hands moved across the controls with precision. “Compensating for density pockets.”

The Faded Glory groaned, the hull plates vibrating under stress. The engines’ pitch deepened, a long metallic moan that sounded almost alive.

Eli smirked despite himself. “She doesn’t like it.”

“She will learn,” Stent said.

They plunged deeper. Lightning arced silently across the nebula’s interior, violet and white, painting their faces in momentary glare. Outside, the static swallowed them whole.