Brad emerged from slumber in his room aboard the Red Home. He lay there for several minutes, trying to return to sleep, but something refused to let him.
Groaning, he staggered to his feet and reached under the bed for the stims he kept stashed inside a false datapad. Nobody knew about them.
At least he hoped nobody knew about them.
Brad swallowed the capsule whole, and rubbed at his eyes. He was running on empty these days. So much to do. So much to atone for.
He breathed deeply as the stim started to kick in, flooding his body with synthetic adrenalins. The rush, paradoxially, calmed him. He couldn't afford to falter, and with his body constantly on overdrive, he knew he wouldn't.
First order of business, as usual... checkin' da email.
Corletti flicked through it with his practiced ease. Spam was discarded without a second glance. Intelligence reports, hastily written reports of trails followed and firefights fought, were read, strip mined for information, and stored for future reference.
Then he reached the final message, a hefty holovid file. The sender was anonymous, but he traced its path as far as it would go and it didn't look like spam. He fed it to the cabin's holovid player and set it going.
Translucent blue objects sprung into being. The holovid viewer locked onto his eyes and displayed the images directly in front of him.
He was seeing the first-person perspective of a cyborg travelling down a dark urban street on a landspeeder. The night sky was visible - this wasn't Coruscant, it was a more normal city, on a more normal world.
The landspeeder pulled up to a curb, and the rider dismounted, revealing a new sight, this one of a group of off-duty pilots leaving a bar.
Taking point was a vision from his past, a woman whose blue starflare tattoo sent electric fire coursing through his veins.
Dorset Konnair.
The woman he'd loved, and betrayed, who'd been his savior, and his most tragic failure.
Targetting reticules flashed before his eyes. Brad felt true fear, but dared not look away, as the cyborg fired on the pilots around Dorset, felling them in a murderous barrage of heavy blaster cannon fire.
Dorset raised her sidearm, but the cyborg destroyed it with mechanical efficiency and advanced on her.
"No..." Brad mumbled, as he watched. "I stopped this..."
The cyborg shot Dorset's legs as she attempted to flee. Her raven hair fell about her shoulders as she struggled to rise despite the crippling injuries she had sustained. The cyborg advanced closer to her, towering above her.
"A gift from Major Corletti," it said, and fired three rounds.
"NO!" Brad cried, powerless to intervene, separated by insurmountable barriers of time and space from the events unfolding, horribly, in front of his eyes.
Konnair twitched, once, twice, and a third time, as the blaster rounds burned holes through her torso.
The holovid lingered on her death throes, as her racked body pitifully attempted to retain life long since lost. Then, the cyborg turned to flee, and the holovid died.
Brad collapsed on the floor as soon as the image died.
There was one thing almost as bad as seeing your life's love die before your very eyes.
Seeing, in her eyes, that she died believing you had ordered it.