Dorn: A Star Wars Story

25. Imperial Phantom

-34 ABY,  29 Years After the Battle of Jakku-

Efficient.

Bloody.

Ruthless.

We gained many fun descriptors over our tenure as the premier Special Forces Squadron among the First Order. A lot changed in the twelve years we collected and stored artifacts of great value, snatching them mockingly out from under Venn and leaving him raging and desperate.

Exactly where I wanted him.

For twelve long years I hounded him across the galaxy, always just out of reach, always just out of sight, but always picking away at his Wraiths and his Rebels. In those twelve years, my squad went from dangerous to lethal, and our efficiency earned us high praise from the Order's new leader - a strange Force sensitive being named Snoke and his apprentice, Kylo Ren. They were shades of Palpatine and Vader, but we kept our heads down and went where we were needed when we were needed there. We answered directly to Armitage now since the death of Brendol, and the boy was showing signs of a ruthless lethality I hadn't seen since Tarkin, for better or worse.

And us?

When we walked into a room, our black armor with the red bloodstripes standing out amidst fields of white and fabric, bodies parted for us, eyes dropped, and troopers watched us in awe. We were the apex predators of the First Order, and everyone seemed to know it. I never would have dreamed of hurting any of them for no reason. Those troopers were my children, my brothers and sisters, and I never would have drawn their blood for no reason. Something about that fear that they beheld us with was an echo of the days of the Empire, but we were not Death Troopers and I hated that look they gave us. Now, when the Admirals, the Generals, those senior, high ranked officers looked at me and started to sweat, something about that pleased me. So long as I was there, I wasn't suffering incompetence from them. I had rank now, authority, and was the commander of the strongest, most lethal squad of Special Forces commandos that had been seen since the peak of Imperial authority. If exercising that authority meant executing an Admiral to save the lives of troopers and the rank and file, then so be it.

Unlike my predecessors, I treated the authority with the respect it deserved. 

I wore my helmet and armor almost all of the time, seeking solace in the bucket on my head like I did for years during the Civil War, and I felt like I had returned to my place. The nightmares never stopped, but the guilt I always felt coiling in my chest since that day on Jakku had numbed. The bloodstripe down my shoulder covered the spot where Aurek had been shot, and it felt like a promise to him more than anything else.

I had been called down to one of the training decks to look over a new group of candidates. While Hux had decided to start kidnapping people to serve the First Order, I just looked for recruits, for people plagued by pirates and syndicates abandoned by the Republic. I had loyalty, then, not servitude. I stood beside Horran as we watched the newest batch run drills. They were a decent group, but only about half of them would make the cut as infantry forces under the Resplendent  and the Apalis. They would report directly to me and would be the backbone for any special missions I would be running, and I needed the best. The rest of them would be sent off other places to serve as regular infantry, and it saddened me that I couldn't keep them all. A part of me said that I would find a way.

"What do you think?" Horran asked as the training commander lined them all up and called them to attention.

"They're a good group," I replied, my voice coming through distorted in my vocoder, "and I think we should try to keep as many as we can. I don't want many of them going to Hux. They'll last longer with us."