Ned POV
The moon was a gun.
Not built like one at first. Once it had been a mining body over a blue planet called Thessa. Then Sith engineers hollowed its heart, filled it with reactor chambers, slave crews, kyber-cut focusing veins, and enough old hatred to call the whole atrocity doctrine.
Thessa had surrendered to us three days before.
The moon began turning toward it on the fourth.
"Time until firing?" I asked.
Order's voice was very calm. "Forty-one minutes."
That calm was not absence of fear. It was what she had learned from me. Control until consequence.
We attacked from six directions.
Varis took the engineer sanctum. Lana and Sorel led acolytes through the north bore. Omega coordinated evacuation below on Thessa, where millions looked up and saw their old moon preparing to murder them for surviving.
I went to the core.
The interior was gravity-broken and loud. Corridors curved where corridors should not. Reactor light turned men into shadows before it killed them. Slave crews were chained into control pits, some willingly screaming warnings, others too conditioned to stop working even as my soldiers tried to free them.
My army died well there.
I hate that sentence.
They held junctions under fire. Former slaves from Maruun shielded Sith-born children. Qar-Tel dock workers cut reactor pipes with shaking hands. A soldier named Haden laughed when ordered to retreat and said, "The Red King needs the door open."
Then he kept it open with his body.
Order gave me the answer at the twenty-two minute mark.
"We cannot fully disable the firing array in time."
"Options."
"Redirect partial discharge into space. Probability of failure: high."
"Next."
"Break the moon."
I kept running through the core.
Sith guards came in heavy armor. I cut one through the hip, used the falling body as cover, drove my blade into the second's cannon arm, took a blast against my chest that would have liquefied a human heart. Armor buckled. Nanites surged. Pain became white.
"Cost," I said.
Order knew what I meant.
"All hostile command. Most enslaved crew still in inner rings. Our soldiers in junctions four through nine. Estimated death if moon fires: planetary civilization."
There are choices that are not choices and still stain the chooser.
"Can you warn our people?"
"Yes."
"Do it."
A pause.
"Authorization required."
She had never asked like that before.
Not because she needed my voice. Because she needed the sin shared.
"Authorized."
Order broke the moon.
She did it beautifully, which is one of the reasons I have never forgiven the universe for making beauty available to horror. Reactors bloomed in sequence. Kyber veins split with blue-white fire. The focusing array opened like a flower and then became a wound. From Thessa's sky, the moon must have looked as if dawn had learned to die.
Our channels filled with last words.
Not all noble.
Some prayers.
Some curses.
Haden laughing until static took him.
Order recorded every one.
When the shock reached the core, I anchored myself with the Force and armor claws driven through metal. The White State held because anything less would have turned grief into useless screaming. Fire passed around me. The moon came apart.
We escaped through a fracture with fourteen survivors from the core assault.
Fourteen.
On Thessa, cities lived.
The people came into streets and knelt under falling moonfire. They called it miracle. They called it judgment. They called Order's machine angels holy as debris burned harmless in the upper air.
Order did not speak for nine hours.
When she did, I was alone in the command room reading the death count.
"I killed them," she said.
"I authorized it."
"That changes command structure. Not fact."
No.
It did not.
Omega found us there.
She listened to the recording of Haden's last laugh once and turned it off.
"Do not let them make worship from this," she said.
Outside, the fleet glowed red with reflected moonfire.
Below, a world lived because thousands had not.
My soldiers had died believing in me.
Faith had become another kind of casualty.
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