Author's Note: The next couple of chapters are going to follow the events of the Empirical from the perspective of 2 certain characters. And if you've seen the picture above, then you can already assume that this chapter is for Chloe's perspective of events on the Empirical...and a little more as well, for those following her painful strolls down memory lane so far. I hope you enjoy this chapter, either way, and please let me know what you think of this chapter. 

The wailing of the alert klaxon woke up Chloe from a long and miserable nightmare in which she had been filing the report of her mission on Callos, not with Darth Vader, but with her father, who had stood towering over her, long nose jutting out like the arm of a gallows, and pronounced her a failure...

But the mission was successful, she had protested! She had followed orders to the letter! "Not good enough!", he had said to her. "Never good enough, girl! When will you realize and stop trying!?"

She woke with a gasp, hanging suspended from the magna locks where the guards put her every day. The routine was worse than torture! They would take her down once every five hours for a ten-minute walk. She could use the refresher and drink as much water as her stomach could hold. Sometimes they gave her food, but not always.

When the ten minutes were up, she went back into position, hanging with her arms outstretched between the locks, legs dangling, wearing the same uniform pants and singlet she'd had on when she arrived...wherever she was...

The guards never told her anything. She could tell, though, they regarded her with contempt. A traitor to the Empire, she deserved no better...That she was still alive puzzled all of them. Her continued presence drained their patience as well as their resources. They surely had better things to do.

But they followed orders to the letter, like good Stormtroopers, and that meant that someone, somewhere, wanted Chloe Moretz alive. To suffer, perhaps, before she died. Still, every time the troopers came near her, she expected that her time had come, that they would take her down and execute her right there, with a single blaster shot to the head.

At least that, she thought in her darkest moments, would be a kind of release...

Her throat and lips were parched. Her head and arms ached. She could barely feel her fingers because the locks held her so tightly around her wrists.

This time, with a siren wailing, she successfully fought the urge to despair.

"Alert!" blared a voice over the station intercom. "Ship navigation systems have malfunctioned! Repeat, ship navigation systems have malfunctioned!"

She raised her head and looked around. The other cells, visible across the central prison department area, were empty. Her guards were momentarily absent, probably checking the source of the alert. If she'd had any way of freeing herself, she could have run during the confusion for an escape pod and gotten away from the station forever!

And then...?

Feeling a surge of frustration, she strained against her bonds. Muscles stood out on her thin arms. Her wrists were bruised from numerous such attempts. One day, she had told herself many times, the power would flicker and locks would fail just long enough. Until then, it was a good form of exercise. Straining and hoping was much better than thinking - about what had happened to her, or to what might be to come.

The station lurched around her! She sagged momentarily before trying again. Whatever was going on, it was serious. She could hear the Stormtroopers barking at one-another.

"Why aren't these bulkheads opening!?"

"We have to get to the escape pods!"

"The door isn't accepting the security codes!"

The announcer returned with an ominous-sounding update: "Security breach in Sector Nine! Subject Zeta has escaped! Set blasters to kill!"

"Oh, that's not good...!", commented one of Chloe's erstwhile guards. Even through his vocoder, Chloe could hear the fear in his voice.

She didn't know who or what Subject Zeta was, but she was determined not to be hanging up like a dead Womp Rat when it found her!

Tugging on her bonds, she thought she felt one of them weaken!

Two troopers appeared in her field of vision, blaster rifles held at the ready. They were aimed not at her, but back down the hallway!

"Forget the prisoner!", said one. "We've got to get out of here!"

"What about...him?"

"Let him die with the rest of the experiments!"

They punched at the air lock leading from the detainee area, but had no luck there, either. The air lock was securely sealed as well. Abandoning that futile task, they ran back the way they had come. Blasterfire and screams echoed up the corridor. 

Chloe resumed her escape attempt. The locks hadn't shifted a millimeter. The illusion of slippage had come as a result of blood from her right wrist lubricating the restraint on that side. She yanked harder, ignoring the pain, but was as stuck fast as ever!

"Empirical security systems are offline!", warned the announcer. "All Imperials are advised to breach bulkhead doors and secure escape pods!"

The ship juddered around Chloe, and the announcer returned in a more anxious tone: "All escape pods have been jettisoned - empty. Await, uh...Await further orders. What?" The announcer must have turned away with the microphone open. "What fool ordered that!?"

The broadcast ended with a loud click, almost drowned out by the sound of blasterfire and the station shaking around Chloe. The cries of Stormtroopers dying made her more determined than ever to get away before whatever had killed them found her, but she could make no greater effort than she already was!

Exhausted, she sagged weakly in the locks, sucking in air that tasted of smoke and blood. It was getting warmer, too, which couldn't be a good sign! The flexing of the walls had to be more than just turbulence. If something had gone terribly wrong and the station's orbit had been disturbed, the commotion could come from thermal expansion - not dangerous in itself, but lethal if they came too close to the source.

Executed, killed by the thing that escaped from Vader's lab, or burned alive: those appeared to be the only choices open to her. After all of her years of loyal service and everything she had done in the name of the Empire, and despite constant lip service paid by Palpatine to notions of justice and the public good, this was where she had ended up. All her dreams and advancements shattered. Her life in ruins...

She wondered what her father would think of her now, if he could see her and hear side of the story...What faith could he possibly have in a system that turned on her for no reason? What did anyone owe an Emperor who condemned her for obeying orders?

But she knew she could never have convinced him to believe the truth, just as she knew that she could never have talked to him about the doubts that had stirred in her after Callos - and not just about Vader's handling of the affair. The official story of her mother's death was that she had been killed in crossfire. What if the Empire had been as heavy-handed on Corulag as the Black Eight had been on Callos...?

For the thousandth time she saw her bombs striking home on the planetary reactor, the brilliant explosions lighting up the jungle. Only as she pulled up out of her run and sped from orbit did she note the chain reaction her strikes had caused:

The stricken reactor was belching pollutants into the atmosphere and spewing megaliters of caustic chemicals from vast underground stores into the canals that fed it with fresh water. She could practically see the living surface of Callos recoil from the poisons she had inadvertently released! A cold, sick feeling began to blossom in her gut...

That feeling only became worse on her return to her base ship...Amid the backslapping of her Black Eight pilots, she had felt a growing urgency to check telemetry data gathered by the ship. From the privacy of her quarters she had watched, appalled at the sight of the reactor burning on beneath a spreading pall of deadly smoke! Lightning flashed under the dense mushroom cloud, starting fires and catalyzing deadly chemical reactions! Nearby river systems were soon utterly choked with biological debris!

Trying to keep her voice level, she had commed a friend with a background in environmental science. He had seen the data....His projections were dire....

"It's a runaway chain reaction for certain," he had said. "I hope you got a close look at those forests while you were down there. They won't be there six months from now, and they're never coming back."

A whole biosphere destroyed...and for what!? This wasn't just because Callos had dared wriggle in the Emperor's grip. Neither was it solely because she had requested a degree of clemency from the campaign's director: Lord Vader. 

The Emperor was less interested in punishing, she had begun to suspect, than setting an example.

The terrible thing about examples, though, was that there didn't have to be anyone left alive afterward...A ruin told the story as effectively as an eyewitness - perhaps more so, for the ringing silence left in the wake of such an outrage only served to impress the Emperor's boot heel even more deeply into the galaxy.

No protests. No alarm bells. No warnings.

What had the Empire come to?

Perhaps, she had dared to think, the Empire had always been like this...

Before she could follow that line of thought to any kind of conclusion, orders had come from Vader to report to the Executor for a new duty. Glad to be absolved of any further involvement in genocide...or so she had hoped...she had said nothing of her misgivings and moved on, mistakenly thinking that, by some small miracle, she had avoided becoming snarled in the Empire's gargantuan workings, as Callos had been, and Starkiller, and perhaps her mother, too, all those years ago...

So many lives, ground under the treads of the Imperial machine....

Hers barely seemed worth worrying about, sometimes...But she still asked, in her darkest hours: Why me? What had the Dark Lord seen in her that made her suited to the assignment to Starkiller?

Not her conscience, surely. Not her sunny disposition...

"Hold it right there!"

Her head came up at the sound of blasterfire closer than it had been before! Bits of droid blew past her door, smoking from their severed joints! The voice of the station commander, a man she had only met once and instantly disliked, bellowed a second time over the cacophony.

"You're not leaving this ship alive, lab rat!"

The unmistakable buzz of a lightsaber rose up from the chaos! She raised her chin higher, straining to see past the door frame.

No. It couldn't be!

The head of a Stormtrooper bounced past her cell, neatly severed from the rest of its body! The armor glowed in a red oval where it had been smoothly truncated through the neck!

Perhaps...?

She shook her head, telling herself she had been hallucinating because of the heat and the atmosphere control. It had been so long since she had last felt hope, she didn't dare give in to it now...

Still, she didn't take her eyes off the entrance to her cell, just in case she was wrong.

She was sure she could get used to the idea this time....

Author's Note: I hope you enjoyed this chapter. What are your thoughts now that what happened to Callos has been revealed?

I'm sorry this took a little longer than previous chapters to get out, but I promise to try not to take too long in updating the story for the next chapter, but I really hope you are doing well, and I hope to see you in the next chapter!