“Five.” A fainted muffled voice called out.

In the darkness around him, he had no idea who it was, but it was familiar.

“Five!” The voice called out again, this time louder.

He felt a light shove on his shoulder. He grumbled in a low tone and hoped the voice would go away. Then he opened his eyes.

Blurry shapes filled his vision as he started to regain the rest of his senses. He felt the thin mattress of his small bed under him. He smelled and tasted the air of his living quarters and heard the voice again, this time much clearer.

He rubbed his eyes so he could see clearly. The person who was talking to him was his fellow squadron member, Kierah Koovah. The Mimbanese woman was already in her flight suit and bending over him.

“Good, you’re awake.” She said. “Lindon sent me to get you up and ready to fly.”

Five sat up on his bed and stretched before replying.

“Wait, have we arrived?!” He asked, a mix of excitement, concern, and nervousness in his voice.

Kierah walked towards the door and stopped in the doorframe to talk. “No, we’re not there yet, but we’ll be there in less than an hour, so get ready.” She rummaged around in her pocket and pulled out a ration bar.

She tossed it to him. “Better eat up, Five. As far as last meals go, a ration bar is a pretty crappy one, but let’s hope it won’t be. Once we arrive at Jakku, you aren’t going to get an opportunity to eat anything else. Now hurry up. Lindon wants you in the hangar bay for a briefing in thirty minutes.” And with that, she walked out, the door shutting behind her.

Five grunted and stood up. Everyone called him Five because of his call sign “Vanguard Five,” and because nobody knew his real name. He and the other members of Vanguard squadron were some of the best pilots in the New Republic.

He sat for a moment and contemplated all the events in his life that led up to this. Joining the Alliance, being assigned to Echo squadron, the Battle of Fostar Haven, those peaceful years at Chandrila, joining Vanguard, being assigned to Project Starhawk, the fateful Battle of Galitan, and now Jakku.

Five pulled on his flight suit, tucked his helmet under his arm, gobbled up the ration bar, and ran to the hangar to meet up with the other pilots.

He reached the hangar. His astromech was waiting for him and fell in behind him once he passed. The hangar fas filled with mingling pirates in their brightly colored flight suits, standing next to a variety of starfighters from a dozen different squadrons.

The light blue energy gate separating the inside from the outside granted a view of the dozens of ships in the fleet heading to destroy the last remnants of the Galactic Empire. The Mon Calamari cruiser Temperance was one of many in it.

In the center of the hangar stood Lindon Javes, an Imperial defector, the Temperance’s commanding officer and close friend of Five, on top of a pile of crates, about to start talking.

Five met up with his other squadron members gathered on the outskirts of the crowd. Kierah was there, but there was also Keo Venzee, a young Mirialan A-wing pilot who loved pulling off stunts.

There was Gracalia Vatara Sienar, who ironically had the last name of a shipbuilding company famous for building TIEs for the Empire.

Then there was Feresk Tssat, a Trandoshan who had a reputation on the Temperance for being unbeatable in an arm-wrestling game.

Lindon quickly hushed the room, tapped his microphone to test that it was working, and gave his speech:

“Attention Temperance crew members…” Lindon lets out a quiet sigh. He clearly put a lot of thought into what he was about to say, and it couldn’t have been easy.

He starts again: “We have been through the worst the war has to throw at us. This next battle will not be much different than that… however, the Empire will fight to defend themselves, perhaps harder than they have ever before, but we will prevail!”

He stopped to take a breath before continuing: “A wise man once told me that a wounded beast only fights harder. While the same may be true for the Empire, it is still wounded! Do not overestimate their strength, but do not underestimate them either!”

He took a breath again: “For too long has the tyrant Palpatine terrorized the galaxy, and while he may be dead, the echoes of his evil still ring throughout the galaxy! No more! Today the Empire dies, and the galaxy may finally begin to recover from this nightmare! So, get to your stations! The galaxy will remember this day! They will rejoice at the Empire’s fall!”

With that, the hangar filled with commotion of pilots and ground crews racing to prepare the various starfighters for combat.

Lindon stepped down and walked towards the gathered Vanguard Squadron, which all turned to face him.

When Lindon reached him, he smiled, but it wasn’t his usual, warm smile. Five met Lindon’s eyes and saw sorrow in them. He knew that many of his friends would die today.

He spoke. The sorrow was in his voice, too.

“You guys have come a long way since I first met you. I worry for you this time, though. Even through everything you faced, you have never seen anything like this before. There is a great chance that you will die. If you do, there’s something I want to say to you: I could never have hoped for better pilots to fly alongside me during the final battle. I wish you the best out there. Dismissed.”

Lindon walked away to his own ship, and the other Vanguard pilots ran off to their ships. Five stood there for a little while, hanging on to those words. He wondered if this would be his last mission.

If so, he would die for the cause he believed in.

He glanced around the hangar for his fighter before he spotted it: An X-wing with pine-green stripes and the markings of Vanguard Squadron on its S-foil wings.

It was parked next to another fighter. Some B-wing from Kestrel Squadron. He walked up to his fighter. He moved his astromech into position so the magnet crane could lift him up and into his slot on the x-wing. He climbed up the ladder and lowered himself into the cockpit. A member of the ground crew team removed the ladder almost immediately after.

He pressed a button on the dashboard and the canopy sealed shut, pressurizing to keep out the deadly environment of space. Five thought about that sometimes. The only thing separating him from that cold, dark abyss was a thin sheet of glass and steel.

He ran diagnostics and turned on his comms. The first voice he heard through it was Gracalia’s.

“Hey Five, bet you never thought the war would end so dramatically, huh?” She asked.

“Actually, this is about how I thought it would end.” Five replied.

Feresk chimed in from his ship. “I’m with Five on this one. I knew the Empire wouldn’t go down without a fight.”

Kierah entered the conversation. “Alright, enough small talk. Entering the Jakku system in three minutes. Run final pre-flight checks and brace yourselves.”

A resounding cacophony of agreeing noises came from the other members of the squadron, including Keo, who had also joined the comms group.

To Five, those minutes felt like hours. He was nervous. A sudden rumbling signified that the Temperance, along with the rest of the New Republic fleet had emerged from hyperspace. The familiar sound of the ship’s alarms rang through the hangar, barely audible through the cockpit.

His ship, along with a mix of two-dozen other transports, starfighters, bombers, and interceptors, launched from the hangar in a swarm. Five could he dozens of rebel capital ships, all prepared for battle.

It wasn’t long before they were swarmed by tie fighters. The comms filled with squadron leaders barking orders at each other and chatter from at least thirty panicking pilots.

Five narrowly dodged a volley of glowing emerald bolts when he spotted a target: a Gozanti-class carrier. Surprisingly, it still had three TIEs docked on its underside. The perfect, vulnerable target.

He maneuvered through the battle until he was flying straight at the exposed TIEs. He fired a barrage of bright pink proton torpedoes at them, and the carrier exploded in a bright pink and orange detonation, with the TIEs underneath it being engulfed in the inferno.

Five felt pity for the people he killed. He was sometimes happy while it was happening, but he never slept well afterwards, wondering if those people really deserved to die.

He couldn’t think about that now. There was still a war to end.

A squadron of TIEs had destroyed a nearby corvette, only to be scattered by fire from a pair of x-wings. Five took in the full scale of the battle around him:

The Starhawk Concord was pouring turbolaser blasts into the enemy Super Star Destroyer. Both were heavily damaged and failing, as Jakku’s gravity tugged them ever-closer to the planet.

The imperial formation had collapsed. Star destroyers scattered, some fleeing to the planet’s atmosphere. New Republic cruisers pursued them relentlessly. The battle was spreading fast. Five knew they could win this, but it would be a costly victory.

He boosted his thrusters, diverted some power to his cannons, and spiraled back into the battle, chasing the imperial fleet into the clouds of Jakku.

His deflector shield flashed through the color spectrum. The atmosphere was cooking his ship. Bright orange burned outside the shields, the heat damage being stopped by the thin blue energy barrier that coated his X-wing.

After a minute or two, his ship finally reached a stable area just below the paper-thin clouds of the desert planet. The heat cleared from his viewport, and what he saw was horrifying:

The Super Star Destroyer had crashed-landed into the Jakku dunes… upside-down. The Concord had crashed much further away. The sands were littered with debris.

Star Destroyers slowly sank to the desert, some using their tractor beams in a final attack to drag New Republic ships to the grave along with them.

Explosions dotted the skies, along with whatever ships had entered the atmosphere and were still intact. The Empire still fought. But why? Five thought. What’s the point of fighting anymore? You’re going to lose!

But then Five remembered: The Empire, in all its glory, was too stubborn to give up.

The battle was carnage. His console blinked bright red in alarm. Something big was coming behind him. His astromech beeped in panic. The translation appeared on the console:

“Get out of the way!”

Without even hesitating, or stopping to wonder what was coming, he wrenched the joystick and his X-wing careened hard to the left. His console stopped flashing in alarm, and he re-stabilized his ship. When the dizziness from the maneuver faded, he looked out the cockpit to see what had passed him.

A Nebulon-b frigate, badly damaged and charred from atmospheric entry and turbolaser fire, sped passed him and crashed into the Star destroyer Eviscerator.

Five guided his ship slowly out of the Star destroyer’s path. Even burning, crippled, and being tugged into the dunes by Jakku’s gravity, he feared it could still fire at him.

As he moved away from it, he noticed that most of the Imperial ships had fallen out of the sky, with New Republic cruisers picking off the remaining forces. He almost relaxed.

Almost…

An explosion rocked his X-wing. Five glanced back at the Eviscerator, but there was no trace that it had fired at him. He looked ahead again. A blur of a ship flew past him. His shields flared in protest to the explosion, his astromech wailed in distress, and his console flashed with alarms.

He wrestled with the joystick to steady the ship. His shields relaxed, but they hadn’t fully recovered from the blow. The droid calmed down, and the console screen was now filled with a locked target.

It was a TIE Defender, but the ship’s signature, which was displayed just below an image of the target, read a signature he didn’t recognize.

Titan Three

“Titan Three” Five repeated. It sounded familiar, but he was sure he didn’t know it. The Tie Defender turned around and started heading back towards him. Five didn’t know this pilot, but he knew they were Imperial, and he knew…

They were there to kill…

Titan Three barreled past him. They nearly collided. Five turned around to chase him, but they had already done a full loop and were coming down on him.

Five looked up as Titan Three went into a dive, spiraling down at him and firing a barrage of lasers. Five dodged out of the way, the emerald bolts hurtling towards the dunes below.

Five accelerated away from Titan Three as they were still pulling up. Once he gained enough distance, he used the drifting trick that Keo had taught him a while back, and quickly turned to face his adversary, who was barreling in his direction. The two were flying right at each other. A voice chimed I over the comms.

“End of the line, rebel scum!”

It was Titan Three. They had somehow gotten into his comm system. They were able to talk to him now, but that didn’t matter now. Before Titan Three could open fire, Five locked on to him and squeezed the trigger…

Clusters of emerald and crimson energy bolts flew. Both ships rattled in protest of the strikes, their shields flashing through the color spectrum.

One of the shields gave out. A ship exploded, and its charred wreckage fell to the sandy graveyard below. Only a cloud of smoke remained where the now destroyed ship had once been.

Five’s X-wing flew through the smoke, his shields barely active. He looked behind him to see the smoking TIE defender barrel into the desert. He breathed a sigh of relief.

A garbled voice came in through his comms: It was Kierah’s.

“Five? Five? What was that? Are you okay? Respond!”

Five groaned. His whole body ached from the fighting. “Don’t worry. I’m here.” He replied

“Are you okay?”

“Okay physically, or okay emotionally?”

“Both.”

“Ehh…”

“Good enough. Who was that pilot?”

“I don’t know, but whoever he is, he’s no trouble to us. Not anymore.”

“Good. Thankfully, the rest of the squadron is still here too, so what do you say to throwing a party on the Temperance?”

“Yes.”

“Great, because I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

The two laughed over the comms. Every last Star destroyer had either fled or been destroyed. Only New Republic ships filled the skies of Jakku, now a fading orange with the setting sun. They flew off in the direction of the fleet.

Another voice chimed in over the comms: Lindon’s.

“Temperance to Vanguard Squadron, that was one hell of a fight. I’m happy to say… welcome home.”

And they were.

——————————

Titan Three, a once great Flight Baron of a dead empire, hauled himself out of the smoking wreck of his TIE. Smoke rose from a thousand charred wreckages all around him visible now, even at night. He cursed at the sky. He saw no ships, New Republic, Empire, or otherwise.

He took off his helmet and threw it into the sand. The only lights in the dark were the moon, the stars, and a dozen fires burning in the distance.

Suddenly, everything around him was illuminated in a near-blinding light. He heard the engines of a ship, a sound he knew.

The ship landed, the lights catching on the dunes, reducing the light enough that he could just barely make out the ship’s form. It was a Lambda-class shuttle. Imperial.

An officer stepped out, their face shrouded in darkness.

“Titan Three?” She asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “Yes?” He replied.

“I’m with the Empire. You need to come with me. We are in need of your services to rebuild order.”

“Where are we going?” He asked.

“Exegol.” She said.

“Exegol? Never heard of it.” He scoffed.

“That’s the point, pilot.” She snapped back, seemingly annoyed.

He grunted.

She turned around and started back towards the shuttle. “Shall we?” She asked.

He nodded. He was Titan Three. The conquerer of the Starhawk. Hero of Galitan. Flight Baron.

He would be part of the Empire again, and he would use his skills to help restore order to the galaxy.

He boarded the shuttle. It lifted off and zoomed off into the starry night, towards Exegol, and to a better future…