Quick Author's Note: I noticed that I've been spelling Chloe's last name incorrectly as I was writing this chapter (hell of a time to find that out, 5 chapters in, hey?), because I always just saw and read her last name as "Mortez" instead of "Moretz". This has been corrected on all previous chapters. Sorry for any confusion beforehand, and I hope you enjoy this short chapter.

The junk world of Raxus Prime was in the Tion Hegmony on the Outer Rim, so there was time during their journey for both Chloe and Starkiller to refresh and research their objectives. He was as distracted as she felt, much to her relief. He kept asking PROXY to repeat details he missed while in deep thought. Eventually he excused himself to enter the ship's small meditation chamber and gather his energies.

Chloe did the same, in her own way, by reclining her seat and putting her feet up on the instrument panel. There was time at last for that short nap she had promised herself.

But everything she had learned in the previous few hours kept circling through her mind, making it hard for her to relax. 

For the hundredth time, she reminded herself to forget about Vader and the Emperor, and concentrate on the mission at hand. If she was going to have insomnia, she might as have think about something useful.

Kazdan Paratus was an odd beast by anyone's definition: PROXY was unable to reproduce his form because all physical details of this particular Jedi had been erased from the records - perhaps by the paranoid Master himself.

Patchy Jedi history files accredited him with considerable skill at droid making, responsible for numerous one-of-a-kind machines possessing abilities far beyond those of ordinary droids. In recognition for his unique talents, the Jedi Council had made him the Temple's official engineer and allowed him a dedicated workshop on Coruscant.

The Clone Wars had lured him out of seclusion to study the Confederacy's droid armies. Life on the front line had afforded him numerous opportunities to examine the war automata, while at the same time building medical droids, power droids, and other units designed to support the clone army.

However a disastrous campaign, during which most of his clone troopers had been killed, led to Paratus cobbling together a makeshift contingent of combat droids under his own command. That happenstance - or perhaps deliberate design - had enabled him to dodge justice upon the issuing of Order 66. Since that day, he had been in hiding.

But now he had turned up on Raxus Prime, a dumping ground for garbage and industrial poison...

Had he been forced there by necessity, or willingly sought shelter there among the broken machines? The records couldn't tell her that.

At least he wasn't a general, though. How dangerous could a droid maker be? Darth Vader might be consider him more powerful than Starkiller, but Chloe couldn't see why. His agent had made short work of Jedi Master Rahm Kota, after all.

Her thoughts began to drift, and she entered a dream-like state midway between waking and sleep. The slightest flicker on the control board and she'd be alert, but otherwise she was at rest, if not entirely at peace...

"The have no defenses," she had informed Lord Vader over her TIE bomber's comms. "The battle is over."

"It is far from over, Captain Moretz. Continue your assault."

Teeth grinding, she clenched her flight stick with both hands and considered her alternatives. She would never disobey a direct order, but the consequences...

"I sense your disapproval, Captain. Speak your mind if you must."

Wasn't he reading it already? She shuddered at the thought. "With respect, sir, it would be genocide to maintain the bombardment - a completely unnecessary waste of life. They are already beaten."

A brief, nerve-wracking pause followed, before a response was given.

"Since you feeling so strongly on this matter, Captain, I will give you an alternate course of action. Strike the planetary reactor at the following coordinates, and strike it hard. Once that is out of action, I will consider this mission complete..."

The coordinates came, and she breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. One precision strike was infinitely preferable to blanket bombing. "Thank you, Lord Vader."

"Your gratitude is wasted on me. Give me success, Captain. That is all."

The channel closed, and she relayed the orders to the rest of the Black Eight. One small victory in a much larger battle: she couldn't afford to dwell on it. Readying her payload, she plotted a course down through the atmosphere of Callos, glad that she would add only a little more damage to all that the little green world had already suffered....

She woke from the dream with a start! Enough! she told herself. She could only beat herself up so much over what happened. What difference did it make now? She was going to drive herself mad by dwelling on it...

Besides, she had more important things to worry about now. What with Darth Vader, Starkiller, rogue Jedi, and the Emperor, she had to stay alert for anything that might give her a chance of getting out in one peace.

Lights were winking on the Rogue Shadow's console. "Tell your master that we are coming out of jump soon," she said to PROXY. "If this is a trap like Nar Shaddaa, he will want to get ready."

"I will inform him." PROXY told her as she fine-tuned the ship's drives in readiness for their arrival. When Starkiller entered the cockpit behind her, she didn't look up from her work.

The streaked starscape of hyperspace snapped back to normality. The world's gravity gripped them. Sublight engines brought the Rogue Shadow around so they were oriented correctly, and heading into the desired orbit. 

Raxus Prime welcomed them in all its decrepit glory. The gray, synthetic world's surface was covered by almost as much metal as Nar Shaddaa, but there is where the similarities ended! Whereas one was alive with light and commerce, the other was a steaming rubbish dump inhabited by scavengers and scum!

Chloe had never been assigned here during any of her previous missions, and had never felt an urge to visit. It had a noxious reputation.

And she could immediately see why: It wasn't just the filthy atmosphere and the mountains of decaying rubbish. This was no moon, like Nar Shaddaa; it was a proper planet, with one with a startlingly strong magnetic field. 

Every orbit lane was filled with junk, and so were a series of complex magnetic field-lanes sweeping near the surface itself. These lines carried iron-bearing fragments aloft in a grim parody of a gas giant's rings. They were crawling with tiny vessels, either automated or single-pilot, searching for anything of value. 

Every now and again lasers flared, cutting at hulks or at rivals homing in on a nearby trinket.

Then there was the Core, the artificial intelligence built by the Republic to guide the refuse world's operation. PROXY said that he would try to patch them into its announcement system once they were within range, but she didn't what help that would be if the Core turned on them.

This was going to be no simple sit-and-wait mission. She tightened her grip on the controls and guided the ship patiently through the navigational nightmare.

PROXY had moved forward to take the copilot's seat beside her. Starkiller, when he came, stood behind them both, assessing the scene through the cockpit viewport.

"PROXY," he asked, "are you picking up any communications yet?"

The droid put a mental hand to his forehead, and suddenly made a strange noise. Chole looked up, and PROXY's photoreceptors flicking; he tilted forward, as if in pain! 

"Too many to decipher, master..."

The droid's holoprojectors flickered unexpectedly. Chloe edged away from an angular vision of metal and cutting blades, with glowing red eyes and insectile limbs. Before she could ask what he was going on, the vision had vanished and the droid continued.

"I can hear thousands of droids all calling out to one another." He looked up to his master, who studied him with a frown. "This is where all droid go to die..."

"Or are taken..." Chloe muttered as she scanned the screens before her. 

"What about Kazdan Paratus?" Starkiller asked PROXY. 

"I can't hear any clues that would lead us to him."

Chloe's eyes widened. Her right index finger came up to draw her companions' attention back to the view. "What about starting over there?"

So saying, she banked the ship to starboard, the better to reveal she had just discovered.

Five slender towers rose up out of the junk piles like a surreal tribute to the past. The central tower was the tallest of the five, with a boxy structure near its tip that always made her of old-fashioned torpedo fins.

The other four were simpler, less ornate. Although undoubtedly made of junk itself, their unique lines could not be mistaken for those of any other monument in the galaxy.

"That looks exactly like the old Jedi Temple on Coruscant." she said.

Starkiller nodded. "Set us down as close as you can."

Chloe searched the surrounding area through a thick drizzle of oily rain. "I will do my best. There are few clearings..." The top of the ziggurat looked dangerously uneven and unsteady. "You will need to approach it on foot."

The Rogue Shadow banked gently from side to side as it traversed the garbage-laden magnetic lanes, and cleared two large mountains of debris. The deeper she went into the atmosphere, the dimmer the primary star became and the greener its light seemed, until she felt her sinuses clogging up out of sympathy.

"There," she said, finally finding a space large enough for the Rogue Shadow to settle. "With a lake view and everything..."

The space was on the shoreline of an irregular body of liquid, one of several pooled among the high points on the junk landscape. She didn't dare set down hard, lest the relatively level surface buckle under the weight of the ship!

Instead, she hovered on the thrusters, skating lightly over the surface as Starkiller made his way back to the ramp.

"Circle past the Temple and wait for my signal." he commed in a businesslike tone.

"Be careful." Chloe sent in reply. "The sludge out there looks corrosive." She waited until the black-clad figure had progressed in inhumanly long leaps from metal ruin to metal ruin and finally disappeared from sight before pushing the repulsors to maximum, and angling the ship up into the sky. She was glad to be doing so. In just the few seconds the hatch had been opened, a foul stench had filled the ship from nose to tail.

"Chloe out."

Author's Note: That will wrap up this short chapter for now, but don't worry: Chapter 6 will be a long chapter, similar to Chapter 3. So, with that in mind, what are your first thoughts on Raxus Prime? What's your thoughts on this brief glimpse into what happened on Callos - the mission and planet that seems to be haunting Chloe - , and your thoughts on the chapter in general.

Apart from that, I hope you all have an amazing day!