He is angry.
Ever since the day he discovered those emails flickering back and forth across the Internet were more than play-imaginings, Brad Corletti's life has been hell.
A long, torturous hell. He has been beaten. He has been bloodied. He has betrayed and been betrayed. He has walked a path of darkness and destruction.
A path lit only with the briefest... starflares... of happiness.
It has changed him. How much, he dreads to think. He thinks of his past self and cannot reconcile it with who... what... he has become.
It is corny to think, but the sentiment is real.
Once he had worn white.
It was simple. It was pure. It was honest.
He had been deceiving himself.
Even then, he realised, he had been hiding from the consequences of his decisions. Blood had been on his hands, beings... people... had died at the hands of his own creations, automatons designed to kill.
And then he had lost even that illusion.
He had been used. Manipulated. Turned into a weapon. His last command ran through his head. "Kill the Jedi".
Kill the Jedi?
At this rate, he'd have to. He'd killed damned near everyone else.
Shattered armour plates lay scattered around him. The bodies of stormtroopers choked the passage. He was under the soil of Iraq, on a mission to find and destroy the shield generator protecting the brutal dictator from retaliation for his crimes against humanity.
The blood on his hands was now literal. The blood of clones clung to them, filling his nose with the smell of iron.
He is angry. Angry at his enemies, and angry at himself, what he has become.
Anger and hatred.
His companion on this mission, a warrior who had been called "Watcher" but now went by "Fes". Brad knows little more about him.
Their way further into the bunker fortress was blocked by a steel door. It was barred from the other side, and would not open even after the lock was melted by blaster fire.
"I'll get that," Fes offered. Brad motioned at the door mockingly with his blaster.
Fes started doing... something... to the door. Brad kept his eyes open, but looking back the way they had come. There were a lot of side passages in this place. It was conceivable that stragglers or sweeping patrols would come across them while they were busy with the door. It was not a situation Brad wanted to find himself caught off-guard in.
The door fell off its hinges. Brad flung himself to the ground, ready to return fire. When he saw that the way, was, in actual fact, clear, he cursed.
Fes raised an eyebrow. "A little jumpy?"
Corletti stormed past the Watcher and ventured into the passage beyond the now-vacant doorframe without a word.
"Oh my God."
"What?"
Brad was pointing the nose of an odd device at a bend in the corridor. Holobeams bounced around the far room, collecting data, and returning to the device, a holoviewer. Brad was using it to see around corners; a high-tech version of the small mirror used by SWAT teams across the globe.
They had finally reached the source of the energy readings they'd been following.
"He's not supposed to have one of these."
"What, Corletti? You know he has a shield."
"No, not that." Brad hissed, gesturing for Fes to take a look at the viewscope. "Look at what's powering it."
"A fusion reactor. That's nothing."
"To you. We have another word for fusion. Thermonuclear. We can't use it for power. We can only use it for bombs. I didn't think the stakes could get higher."
Fes smirked. "The stakes can always get higher." He leapt into the air and disappeared into a tangle of cabling and pipes.
Brad waited. Fes didn't come back.
Corletti panned the holoviewer for another long look around.
A large round chamber, with a high roof. The ceiling, floor, and walls were liberally coated with power cables, coolant pipes, and other assorted techno-industrial arteries. The generator lay at the centre, a crude-looking yet clearly potent example of jury-rigged futuretech meets Communist ironwork.
The relatively small shield generator lay at precisely the centre of the room, fed power by enormous bundles of cable as wide as a man is tall. A complex array of charged metal guidance baffles positioned strategically around the room moved ever so slightly, maintaining the perfect distribution of energy across the entire shield sphere he knew was projected over large chunks of Iraqi soil.
He wanted it. He wanted it so much he could taste blood. He was ready to kill for it.
As luck would have it, there were some people here he very much wanted to kill.
About a dozen Republican Guard were gathered around a TV set. He saw them in profile; the TV set was mounted to the right-hand wall. Seated right in front of it was one of the tyrant's most privileged thugs, one of the few sociopaths Hussein trusted implicitly.
It was one of the fucker's sons, with his handpicked cronies.
Corletti couldn't make out what they were watching, but he could hear it. It wasn't Disney.
Figures. Something as valuable as the shield, Saddam'd have wanted to make sure it was guarded by his own people. A pity for them he'd taken out their sentries on the way in.
He paused in the shadows to plan his next move. Eleven elite Republican Guard, the tyrant's son. Twelve weapons that he couldn't block with the Force.
Brad unslung his blaster carbine. It looked like a HK-MP5, in the sense that an E-11 looks like a Stenn. Flipping it up so he could see the stock, he checked the charge level. Green. Excellent.
He throttled the blaster power up to around the mid-range, made sure it wasn't set to something suicidal, like "Stun".
He fished in combat webbing for a grenade, dropped it. His foot intercepted it before it hit the ground and the projectile careened around the corner, across the shield room, and clocked one of the Guardsmen in the shoulder.
The grenade exploded before the soldier had time to yell.
Corletti's holoviewer, overloaded by the grenade's blast, died in a storm of static as he ran around the corner. The Republican Guards clawed at their burning eyes, having just experienced a flash of light powerful enough to burn out optic nerves and char eye tissues.
Brad had just hit them with one of the galaxy's nastiest flash-bangs.
The first Guardsman was screaming when Corletti rushed into the room. The blaster barked once, and the Guardsman caught the bolt in the chest. It was as if he'd eaten a bomb - the Guardsman exploded into chunks of gore as his tissues vaporised.
A few of the Guardsman started firing their weapons blind, but it was not a threat. They fell first, their weapons falling silent as the men who had fired them were blasted apart.
When he told this story again, he'd have to embellish it. It had been no challenge at all.
He paused a moment to enjoy his victory. He had finally reached the end of his mission. The shield generator lay ahead of him, now unguarded.
The room was silent but for the agonised shrieks coming from the TV set, the humming of the generator, and the hiss of still-burning meat. Corletti was a macabre figure in the midst of the carnage, blood congealing on his hands, matting his hair, darkening the grey of his combat fatigues.
He opened his eyes to the power he had been using. Gaping holes had been torn in the energy field he knew as the Force, tattered strands that had once woven them together had been torn asunder by violent death.
Like it or not, fate had decreed that he was to spend his life brutally butchering everyone in his path. So he might as well take some satisfaction from a job well done.
He smiled, and revelled in the pain of the Force. He had been deceiving himself all along, it was true. He was the killer. It had not chosen him, he had chosen it. He had killed, and killed. For himself.
His thoughts were interrupted by the return of the Watcher, as he dropped down from some mysterious hiding place in the ceiling clutter. The visible parts of his skin were a bright, painful red.
"You almost blinded me with that thing," Fes cursed.
Corletti ignored him and walked towards the shield generator.
"Get back," Fes ordered. He grabbed a thermal detonator from his belt and prepared to lob it.
Brad kept walking. "No. If I wanted to destroy it, I'd have lobbed a thermal myself."
Fes blinked. "I knew it." He lifted his blaster to aim at Brad's head.
Brad turned at the sound. His own blaster whined threateningly as he pointed it at Fes' center of mass.
"So."
"So."
There was something about Fes, Brad thought. Something odd.
As Fes gathered himself for what may about to be combat, Corletti watched the energy flow at the Watcher's bidding.
Ah. A Jedi.
The words echoed in his brain. "Kill the Jedi.".
Brad opened fire.