Ned POV
The dead fleet woke without engines.
At first Order thought the ships were wreckage: black hulls drifting around a tomb moon, half-buried in dust rings, no heat signatures, no active crews, no modern command pulse. Ancient Sith liked to leave monuments where useful things should have been. I nearly made the same mistake.
Then the gravity changed.
Our lead ship folded sideways as if an invisible hand had pinched space. Men struck walls. A cruiser from Maruun split along an old weld. The tomb vessels lit one by one, not with reactor fire, but with red sigils burning beneath stone-black armor.
"Engines remain inactive," Order said.
"Then how are they moving?"
Varis whispered, "They remember where war was."
I looked at him.
"Old ritual navigation," he said. "Before the current Council. Before half their archives were civilized into vanity. Tomb admirals bound routes into corpses, stone, and oath."
"Useful."
"Blasphemous."
"Same question from a different priest."
The tomb fleet came for us like dead history deciding it was owed repetition.
Our predictions failed in the first minute.
Order gave me vectors and the tomb ships moved through them as if they had heard. A frigate died trying to flank empty space. Two of my route captains broke formation and paid for it in white fire. The crews had believed in me. Belief did not make them immortal.
I entered the battle by boarding.
Sometimes a godlike body is still only a key made of violence. I took Lana, six acolytes, Varis, and a squad of soldiers into the nearest tomb ship through a wound blasted by our guns. The inside was cold stone over metal. Dead crew stood in alcoves, armor fused to bone, eyes dark until the ship remembered them.
Then they moved.
Not fast.
Relentless.
Their blades were old Sith iron humming with Force memory. One struck my shoulder and the armor dented instead of flowed. Nanites crawled over the wound and died in little black sparks.
"They hate repair," Order said.
"Many traditions do."
I shifted into the White State.
Not peace. Do not trust men who call it that. It was restraint sharpened until emotion became clean fuel. Grief below. Rage below. Fear below. All of it present, none of it spilling. The Force moved through my body without the tearing heat of anger. Blade, foot, breath, calculation.
First dead guard: cut across wrist, turn, point through helm seam.
Second: Force pressure into the floor, step over, blade reversed into spine.
Third: let the old iron strike my forearm, armor cracking, left hand closing around its throat though it needed no air, push until stone wall took the head.
Lana fought beside me and did not waste motion anymore. She had become beautiful in the way knives are beautiful when no hand is bleeding yet. Sorel carried a wounded soldier with one arm and killed with the other, complaining about both tasks.
At the command crypt, the tomb-admiral waited in a chair made of his own war record.
He spoke a word that made every dead crewman in the ship turn toward us.
Varis answered.
Older word. Lower. Uglier.
The admiral looked at him then, and for a moment I understood that Sith history was not a ladder. It was a pit with voices at different depths.
Varis walked forward alone.
"You have no right," the dead thing said.
"I know," Varis answered.
Then he cut the admiral's head from its preserved body and caught it by the hair before it struck the floor.
The tomb fleet faltered.
Order seized the moment. Our guns fired by her war-song, not at ships, but at the ritual anchors between them. Gravity screamed. The dead formation lost memory. Tomb ships collided, broke, burned like black temples in orbit.
When it ended, we had lost two ships and seven hundred lives.
My soldiers waited for a speech.
I had none worth the dead.
I stood in the command crypt and ordered the archives taken.
Varis looked at the admiral's head in his hand. "You are collecting what you hate."
"I am learning what keeps surviving."
Outside, tomb ships burned against the moon.
The old Sith past had not been greater than us.
Only older.
That was not comfort.
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