The last thing Marcus Chen remembered from his old life was the satisfying crunch of Cheetos between his teeth, the glow of his computer monitor displaying Wookieepedia's extensive article on clone trooper variants, and the distant sound of his mother yelling at him to "get a real job instead of reading about space wizards all day."
He was thirty-two years old. He lived in his parents' basement. He had an extensive collection of Expanded Universe novels arranged in perfect chronological order (not publication order, because he wasn't a savage), three lightsaber replicas mounted on his wall, and a life-sized cardboard cutout of Aayla Secura that he would deny owning if anyone ever asked.
He was also, at that precise moment, experiencing what medical professionals would later describe as "a massive cardiac event brought on by years of sedentary lifestyle, poor dietary choices, and an alarming amount of energy drinks consumed while arguing with Disney apologists on Reddit at three in the morning."
The heart attack hit him like a Rancor's fist to the chest.
"Oh," Marcus managed to wheeze, his hand clutching at his shirt—a vintage 1997 Special Edition promotional tee featuring Luke Skywalker with that weird CGI-enhanced face that everyone pretended didn't look absolutely terrifying. "That's... that's not good."
His vision went dark.
And then, with all the subtlety of a thermal detonator in a china shop, Marcus Chen ceased to exist in the universe he had known.
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED LIKE A KICK TO THE TEETH.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Someone had actually kicked him in the teeth.
"CT-7829! ON YOUR FEET, TROOPER! WE ARE OSCAR MIKE IN THIRTY SECONDS!"
Marcus's eyes snapped open, and for one beautiful, confused moment, he thought he was having the most vivid dream of his entire pathetic existence. The sky above him was a churning hellscape of burnt orange and sickly yellow, filled with so much dust and debris that it looked like someone had put the entire atmosphere through a blender set to "apocalyptic nightmare."
Also, there were laser beams.
Lots of laser beams.
Red ones, specifically, screaming through the air in every direction, impacting the rocky terrain around him with explosive force that sent showers of pulverized stone cascading in all directions. The sound was indescribable—a continuous cacophony of pew-pew-pew and boom and what-the-actual-kriffing-hell that assaulted his ears with the relentless fury of a thousand angry Wookiees having a very bad day.
"I SAID MOVE, SOLDIER!"
Marcus turned his head—and immediately noticed two things that made his brain perform the cognitive equivalent of a Windows blue screen of death.
First: he was wearing armor. White armor. Plastoid composite armor with black bodyglove underlayer, to be specific, featuring the distinctive Phase I clone trooper helmet design that he recognized instantly from approximately nine thousand hours of obsessive Star Wars media consumption.
Second: the person yelling at him was a clone trooper. An actual, real-life, impossible, shouldn't-exist, how-is-this-happening clone trooper, complete with the weathered armor, the DC-15A blaster rifle, and the orange pauldron that marked him as some kind of squad leader or sergeant.
"Wh—" Marcus started to say, but his voice came out wrong. Too deep. Too resonant. Too... Jango Fett.
Oh.
Oh no.
OH STANG.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" the sergeant clone bellowed, his helmet's vocabulator giving his voice that distinctive filtered quality that Marcus had heard in countless movies, shows, and video games. "ARE YOU HIT? CHECK YOUR SEALS! WE NEED TO—"
Whatever else the sergeant was going to say was lost forever to history, because at that precise moment, a Battle Droid—an actual, honest-to-the-Force, tan-colored, blaster-wielding B1 Battle Droid—came marching around a nearby boulder with all the menacing presence of a trash compactor with delusions of grandeur.
"Roger roger," the droid said, because of course it did, raising its E-5 blaster rifle with mechanical precision.
Marcus's body moved before his brain could catch up.
Later, he would attribute this to the flash-training that all clone troopers received during their accelerated development on Kamino—ten years of combat instruction, tactical knowledge, and military doctrine crammed into a skull that was technically only about half that age. The clones didn't just learn to fight; fighting was encoded into their very being, written into muscle memory and neural pathways with the kind of thoroughness that would make any drill sergeant weep with joy.
In that moment, Marcus's conscious mind was still screaming WHAT IS HAPPENING WHY AM I A CLONE TROOPER THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE I WAS JUST EATING CHEETOS, but his body—his borrowed, genetically-engineered, combat-ready body—was already in motion.
He rolled.
The blaster bolt that would have taken his head off instead scorched the ground where his helmet had been a fraction of a second earlier, turning sand into glass with a hissssss of superheated fury.
Marcus came up in a crouch, his hands finding the DC-15S blaster carbine mag-locked to his thigh with an ease that spoke of countless hours of simulated training, his thumb flicking the safety off, his finger finding the trigger, his arms raising the weapon in a textbook Westar-pattern shooting stance—
And he fired.
The blue bolt caught the Battle Droid dead center in its torso, punching through the thin durasteel plating like it was made of cardboard. The droid's photoreceptors flickered once, twice, and then it collapsed in a heap of sparking components and shattered ambition.
"NICE SHOT!" the sergeant clone shouted, already moving past Marcus toward a nearby rock formation that might generously be called "cover" by someone with a very optimistic definition of the word. "NOW MOVE YOUR SHEBS BEFORE—"
The rest of his sentence was drowned out by the sound of approximately everything exploding at once.
MARCUS RAN.
He ran because the alternative was dying, and despite the overwhelming evidence that he had already died once today, he wasn't particularly eager to repeat the experience. The Cheetos-and-heart-attack death had been embarrassing enough; getting shot by a Battle Droid on what he was increasingly certain was the surface of Geonosis would just be insulting.
Because that's where he was.
Geonosis.
The opening battle of the Clone Wars.
The place where the Grand Army of the Republic made its dramatic debut, where Jedi fell by the dozens in the Petranaki Arena, where Count Dooku proved that he could absolutely throw down with the best of them despite being old enough to collect a pension, and where—perhaps most relevantly to Marcus's current situation—thousands upon thousands of clone troopers died in the opening salvos of a war that would ultimately destroy everything they were fighting for.
"This is fine," Marcus panted to himself, his boots pounding against the rocky terrain as he sprinted from one piece of cover to the next, blaster bolts sizzling past him with alarming regularity. "This is totally fine. I'm just a clone trooper. In the Clone Wars. During the battle that had one of the highest casualty rates of the entire conflict. This is FINE."
It was not fine.
A Super Battle Droid—one of the big ones, the ones that looked like someone had taken a B1 and fed it a steady diet of steroids and existential rage—came stomping around a destroyed Republic gunship, its wrist-mounted blasters already spitting fire. The first shot went wide, cratering the ground to Marcus's left. The second clipped his shoulder pauldron, sending a spray of sparks cascading across his vision and spinning him half around with the force of the impact.
"OSIK!" Marcus swore, the Mando'a curse word springing to his lips before he could even think about it—another gift from his flash-training, apparently, because the real Marcus Chen had only known the word from reading Karen Traviss novels at two in the morning. "OSIK OSIK OSIK!"
He dove behind the wreckage of the gunship, his back slamming against twisted metal that was still hot from whatever had brought the transport down. Through the shattered transparisteel of the cockpit, he could see the bodies of the pilots—clones, just like him, their armor scorched and broken, their visors dark and empty.
For one horrible moment, Marcus felt the reality of his situation crash over him like a wave of ice water.
These weren't special effects. This wasn't a movie. These were real people—or at least, they were as real as he was now—and they were dead. They had been alive, probably just minutes ago, probably joking with each other about the mission or complaining about the dust or doing whatever it was that clone troopers did when they weren't actively being shot at, and now they were just... corpses.
And he was going to join them if he didn't get his head in the game right kriffing now.
The Super Battle Droid was still coming. He could hear its heavy footsteps, each one shaking the ground with a bass-heavy thump that seemed to resonate in his chest. The wreckage he was hiding behind wouldn't stop a determined assault from one of those things—they could punch through starship hulls when they felt like it, and the twisted remains of a LAAT/i gunship were definitely not going to—
Wait.
Marcus's eyes fell on the gunship's interior, and specifically, on the equipment rack that was still somehow mostly intact. Hanging from it, secured by magnetic clamps that had survived the crash through sheer dumb luck, was a PLX-1 portable missile launcher.
"Oh, you beautiful piece of military hardware," Marcus breathed, scrambling toward the weapon with all the grace of a desperate man who had just remembered that he was heavily armed.
The PLX-1 was heavy—probably around twelve kilograms, according to the technical specifications that Marcus had memorized for absolutely no reason other than being a massive nerd—but his clone body handled the weight like it was nothing. He grabbed the launcher, checked the ammo counter (three missiles remaining, praise the Maker), and spun toward the opening in the wreckage just as the Super Battle Droid's massive form appeared in his field of view.
The droid's photoreceptors registered the missile launcher.
If droids could feel fear, Marcus imagined that this would be the moment when it would have felt it.
"Hey," Marcus said, his vocabulator-filtered voice coming out far more confident than he actually felt. "Roger this."
He pulled the trigger.
The missile screamed out of the launcher with a roar of igniting propellant, covering the distance between Marcus and the Super Battle Droid in less than a heartbeat. The explosion was magnificent—a fireball of orange and red and white that consumed the droid utterly, sending chunks of burning metal flying in every direction, the shockwave washing over Marcus and rattling his bones even through the protection of his armor.
When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the Super Battle Droid but a crater and some scattered components that were still sparking feebly.
"YEAH!" Marcus screamed, his voice cracking with a combination of terror and exhilaration that he had never experienced before in either of his lives. "THAT'S WHAT YOU GET! THAT'S WHAT YOU KRIFFING GET!"
"Nice work, shiny!" someone called from behind him.
Marcus spun around to find a group of clone troopers sprinting toward him—five of them, their armor painted with blue markings that he recognized instantly as belonging to the 501st Legion. They moved with the fluid coordination of soldiers who had trained together their entire lives, covering each other's movements, checking corners, never staying still long enough to present an easy target.
"You with a unit?" the lead trooper asked, skidding to a halt beside the gunship wreckage. His helmet bore the distinctive paint job of a sergeant, and through his visor, Marcus could see the same face that he was now wearing—Jango Fett's face, or at least the face that Jango Fett had passed on to two hundred thousand (with a million more well on the way) identical soldiers.
"I—" Marcus started, and then his brain caught up with the question. What unit was he with? He didn't know. He had no idea. He had woken up on this battlefield with a number (CT-7829, apparently) and a body that wasn't his and absolutely no context for how he had gotten here or where he was supposed to be.
"Gunship went down," he said instead, jerking his head toward the wreckage behind him. It wasn't a lie—there was a gunship, and it had gone down—and he hoped it would be enough of an explanation to satisfy the sergeant without requiring Marcus to admit that he was actually a confused nerd from another dimension who had been eating snack food approximately five minutes ago from his subjective perspective.
The sergeant nodded grimly. "Lots of that going around. Clankers have the whole area covered with triple-A. We've lost six gunships just in our sector." He gestured sharply with one hand. "You're with us now, trooper. We're pushing toward the primary objective—Separatist command ship went down about two klicks northeast. General wants us to secure the crash site before the bugs can strip it for intel."
General? What general? Which Jedi was in command of this sector? Was it someone Marcus would recognize? Was it one of the characters he had spent years reading about, watching on screen, arguing about on forums? Was it—
"Move it!" the sergeant barked, already jogging toward the northeast. "We don't have time to stand around with our thumbs up our—"
A laser cannon blast—the big kind, the kind that came from artillery emplacements rather than personal weapons—slammed into the ground about thirty meters to their left, throwing up a fountain of dirt and rock that rained down on them like the world's most aggressive and least fun meteor shower.
"MOVE!" the sergeant screamed. "MOVE MOVE MOVE!"
Marcus moved.
THE NEXT TWENTY MINUTES WERE THE MOST TERRIFYING OF MARCUS'S EXISTENCE.
And that was saying something, because his existence now technically included the memory of dying, which had been pretty high on the terror scale. But at least dying had been quick—a heart attack, a moment of pain, and then nothing. This was different. This was sustained terror, the kind that settled into your bones and made a home there, the kind that had you flinching at every sound and seeing enemies in every shadow.
The landscape of Geonosis was a nightmare made manifest.
The planet's surface was a maze of rocky spires and deep canyons, all of it colored in shades of rust and orange and sickly yellow that made Marcus's eyes ache even through his helmet's polarized visor. The air was thick with dust—Geonosian dust, he knew, laced with silicate particles that would shred unprotected lungs within hours—and the constant thunder of combat made it impossible to go more than a few seconds without being reminded that he was in the middle of the largest ground engagement the galaxy had seen in a thousand years.
The Separatist droid army was everywhere.
B1 Battle Droids marched in formations that would have been comedic if they weren't also extremely lethal, their blaster rifles spitting crimson death with mechanical precision. B2 Super Battle Droids stomped through the chaos like miniature tanks, their armor shrugging off glancing hits, their wrist blasters cutting down clone troopers with brutal efficiency. Droidekas—the things that even Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan had run from, the rolling nightmares with personal shield generators and twin blaster cannons—appeared at the worst possible moments, their shields flickering to life as they transformed from their wheel-mode into their walking configuration of absolute destruction.
And above it all, the Geonosian drones swarmed.
Marcus had always thought the Geonosians were kind of silly-looking in the movies—insectoid aliens with weird clicking languages and a disturbing enthusiasm for death arenas. Seeing them in person, however, was an entirely different experience. They were fast, their wings carrying them through the air with a buzzing fury that set his teeth on edge, their sonic blasters firing pulses of concentrated sound that could rupture organs and shatter bone.
One of them dove at the squad from above, its sonic blaster raised.
Marcus didn't even think. He just reacted.
His DC-15S came up, his finger squeezed the trigger, and a trio of blue bolts stitched across the Geonosian's torso in a tight grouping that would have made his flash-training instructors proud. The alien tumbled out of the sky, its wings going still, its weapon clattering away across the rocks.
"GOOD SHOOTING!" one of the 501st troopers called—a clone with the designation "Scatter" painted on his helmet, according to the small text that Marcus's HUD helpfully highlighted when he focused on it. "You sure you're a shiny? You shoot like you've been doing this for years!"
Ten years of flash-training, Marcus thought grimly, plus thirty-two years of being obsessed with this franchise to an unhealthy degree. He didn't say that, though. Instead, he just grunted an acknowledgment and kept moving, his eyes scanning the terrain for the next threat.
The crash site came into view a few minutes later—a massive Separatist command ship that had plowed nose-first into a rocky plateau, its hull torn open by the impact, fires burning in a dozen different places along its length. Republic forces were already engaging around the perimeter, their blue blaster bolts forming a stark contrast against the red fire of the droid defenders.
"That's our objective!" the sergeant shouted over the din of combat. "We need to breach the hull and get to the command center before the droids can wipe the databanks! Intel says there might be information about Separatist troop movements, supply lines, maybe even—"
He never finished the sentence.
The artillery round came out of nowhere—a blazing sphere of destructive energy that slammed into the ground right in the middle of the squad's formation. The explosion was blinding, deafening, overwhelming, and Marcus felt himself lifted off his feet and thrown through the air like a ragdoll in a hurricane.
He hit the ground hard, his armor's impact-absorption systems screaming in protest, his HUD flickering with damage warnings and system alerts. For a long moment, he just lay there, stunned, watching the orange sky spin above him in lazy circles.
I'm dead, he thought. I'm definitely dead this time. There's no way I survived that. I'm going to wake up somewhere else—maybe as a Gungan, wouldn't that be just my luck—and I'll have to do this all over again—
But the pain that flooded through his body a moment later told him he was very much alive.
Alive, and hurting.
"Urrghh," Marcus groaned, forcing himself to roll onto his side. His armor was scorched and dented, and his left arm was sending signals that suggested it was probably broken or at least severely bruised, but his helmet's medical readout indicated that nothing was life-threatening. Small mercies.
He pushed himself up onto his knees, then onto his feet, swaying slightly as his equilibrium struggled to reassert itself. The crater from the artillery strike was maybe twenty meters away, and the sight of it made his stomach lurch.
Two of the 501st troopers were down and not moving.
The sergeant was dragging himself toward cover with his one remaining functional arm, his other arm a ruin of shattered plastoid and scorched bodyglove.
Scatter was somehow still standing, though his armor looked like it had been through a garbage compactor, and he was firing his blaster with one hand while helping another wounded trooper limp toward the relative safety of a nearby boulder with the other.
"CT-7829!" Scatter called when he spotted Marcus. "You're alive! Get over here and help me with—"
Another artillery round screamed in, impacting about fifty meters to the east, and Marcus decided that standing still was approximately the worst thing he could possibly be doing at this moment.
He ran.
His boots pounded against the rocky ground, his lungs burned with exertion, and his broken arm sent spikes of agony up into his shoulder with every jarring step, but he kept running. Scatter had the wounded trooper mostly under control, so Marcus angled toward the sergeant instead, sliding to a halt beside the injured NCO and grabbing him under his good arm.
"Come on, Sergeant!" Marcus shouted, hauling the larger clone to his feet through sheer adrenaline-fueled determination. "We need to move!"
"The mission—" the sergeant started, his voice strained with pain.
"The mission can wait until we're not actively being bombarded!" Marcus interrupted, which was probably insubordination of some kind but also seemed like really solid tactical advice under the circumstances. "Move your shebs, soldier!"
They ran together, the sergeant leaning heavily on Marcus for support, the sounds of battle raging around them like the galaxy's worst symphony. Somehow—through luck, through skill, through the intervention of whatever cosmic force had decided to make Marcus's life this particular flavor of interesting—they made it to cover.
The boulder they collapsed behind was barely large enough to shield them from direct fire, but it was better than nothing. Scatter arrived a moment later with the other wounded trooper, and the four surviving members of their squad huddled together in the relative safety of their rocky shelter, gasping for breath and trying very hard not to think about how close they had just come to dying.
"Status," the sergeant grunted, his voice tight with pain.
"Sergeant Blackout has a compound fracture of the left humerus and multiple lacerations," Marcus's HUD supplied helpfully, its medical scanner apparently having taken it upon itself to diagnose everyone nearby. "CT-7829 has a minor fracture of the left radius and superficial burns to the dorsal armor plating. CT-4451 'Scatter' has no significant injuries. CT-6672 has shrapnel wounds to the lower torso and is experiencing moderate blood loss."
"I didn't ask the computer," the sergeant—Blackout, apparently—growled. "I asked you."
"Uh." Marcus blinked, realizing that everyone was looking at him. "Scattered's fine, CT-6672 needs a medic, you need a medic, and I'm... functional. Mostly."
Blackout stared at him for a long moment—or at least, his helmet was pointed in Marcus's direction, which probably amounted to the same thing—and then let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so laced with pain.
"Functional," he repeated. "That's what we're calling it now. Alright, 'functional.' What's your name, trooper?"
"My... name?"
"Your name. The thing you call yourself when you're not using your number. Don't tell me you're one of those shinies who doesn't have one yet."
Marcus's mind went blank.
He wasn't a clone. He wasn't CT-7829. He was Marcus Chen, a thirty-two-year-old underachiever from Earth who had read way too many Expanded Universe novels and died of a heart attack while eating Cheetos. He had a name—a real name—but he couldn't exactly tell these soldiers that, could he? Hi, I'm actually a reincarnated nerd from another dimension, nice to meet you, please don't shoot me?
But he needed to say something.
His eyes fell on the scorched and battered armor he was wearing, on the Republic insignia that was barely visible through the layers of dust and carbon scoring, on the way his hands—Jango Fett's hands, cloned and copied and replicated two hundred thousand times over—were shaking slightly with the aftereffects of adrenaline and fear.
"Scorch marks," he said finally, the name coming to him in a flash of inspiration. "I mean—Scorch. Just... Scorch."
It was a stupid name. It was a name that another clone—a Republic Commando, one of the Delta Squad members—already had, if Marcus's memories of the Expanded Universe were accurate. But it fit, didn't it? He had just survived an artillery strike that should have killed him. He was covered in scorch marks. It made sense.
Probably.
"Scorch," Blackout repeated, testing the name. "Alright, Scorch. Welcome to the worst day of your life. It only gets worse from here."
BLACKOUT, IT TURNED OUT, WAS NOT EXAGGERATING.
The next several hours were a blur of combat, chaos, and the kind of desperate survival that Marcus had only ever experienced in video games—and video games, he was rapidly discovering, had done an absolutely terrible job of preparing him for the reality of being shot at.
In video games, you had health bars and regenerating shields and the comfortable knowledge that death was a temporary inconvenience that could be solved by reloading a save. In real life—or whatever passed for real life when you were a reincarnated clone trooper in a fictional universe—death was permanent, and the universe seemed determined to remind Marcus of this fact at every possible opportunity.
He fought his way through waves of Battle Droids, his DC-15S carbine growing hot in his hands from continuous fire. He dove behind cover as Super Battle Droids laid down suppressive fire that chewed the landscape apart. He screamed warnings to his squadmates when Droidekas came rolling out of side corridors, their shields snapping up just in time to deflect the desperate blaster bolts sent in their direction.
And through it all, he kept not dying.
It wasn't skill—or at least, it wasn't his skill. It was the flash-training, that decade of compressed experience that let his body react to threats before his conscious mind could even process them. It was the armor, which absorbed hits that would have been instantly fatal to his unarmored civilian body. It was luck, plain and simple, the cosmic dice rolling in his favor again and again and again.
It was also, he was increasingly certain, absolutely unsustainable.
They reached the crashed command ship eventually, fighting their way through the droid defenders with the help of two other clone squads that had converged on the same objective. The breach in the hull was big enough to drive a speeder through, and the interior of the ship was a labyrinth of twisted corridors and sparking electronics and emergency lighting that cast everything in shades of red and shadow.
"Command center should be three decks up," one of the other squad leaders reported, consulting a datapad that displayed the ship's schematics. "We'll need to move fast—sensors are picking up a large force of clankers heading this way. Probably trying to secure their data before we can get to it."
"Then we move faster," Blackout said. His arm had been field-dressed by a medic during a brief lull in the fighting, and he was back on his feet through what Marcus could only assume was sheer willpower and a lot of painkillers. "Two squads advance, one squad holds the entrance. Go."
They went.
The climb through the command ship was like something out of a horror movie—dark corridors punctuated by flickering lights, the constant sound of the ship groaning and settling around them, the ever-present threat of droid ambush lurking around every corner. Marcus found himself at the front of the formation more often than he would have liked, his carbine raised and ready, his heart pounding against his ribs with a rhythm that seemed to say you're going to die you're going to die you're going to die.
But he didn't die.
A B1 Battle Droid stepped out of a side corridor, and Marcus's blaster was already firing, two bolts to the center mass that dropped the droid before it could even raise its weapon.
A group of Geonosian warriors came boiling out of a ventilation shaft, their sonic blasters screaming, and Marcus threw himself to the ground as Scatter and the other troopers returned fire, the corridor becoming a light show of blue and sonic pulses that left Marcus's ears ringing even through his helmet's audio dampeners.
A Super Battle Droid came stomping toward them from a connecting passage, its wrist blasters already spitting fire, and Marcus did something incredibly stupid.
He charged it.
Not because he had a plan. Not because it was tactically sound. But because the corridor was too narrow to dodge, his squadmates were behind him and in the line of fire, and somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice that sounded suspiciously like every Star Wars protagonist he had ever admired was screaming ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK.
The Super Battle Droid's first shot went over his head as he ducked low.
The second shot grazed his shoulder, sending a spray of sparks cascading off his armor.
And then Marcus was inside the droid's reach, too close for it to bring its blasters to bear effectively, his hands grabbing onto its chassis, his boots bracing against the floor as he shoved with every ounce of strength his genetically-enhanced body could muster.
The Super Battle Droid stumbled backward—just a step, just a moment of imbalance—and Marcus's hand found the seam in its armor plating where the torso connected to the hip assembly. His fingers closed around a bundle of cables and power conduits, and he pulled.
The droid's legs went dead, its balance disrupted completely, and it toppled backward with a crash of metal on metal. Marcus didn't give it time to recover. He grabbed his carbine from where it had mag-locked to his thigh during the charge, pressed the muzzle against the droid's photoreceptor housing, and fired.
Three shots. Point-blank. The Super Battle Droid's head exploded in a shower of sparks and shrapnel.
"KRIFFING HELL!" Scatter shouted from behind him. "Scorch, that was insane! That was—that was the most insane thing I've ever seen!"
Marcus stood over the destroyed droid, his chest heaving, his hands shaking, his brain slowly catching up to what his body had just done.
"I have no idea how I did that," he admitted, his voice coming out in a breathless wheeze. "I genuinely have no idea. Please don't ask me to do it again."
"Too late," Blackout said, limping up beside him. "You just volunteered to be point man. Congratulations."
"I— What? No! That's not—"
"Command center is just ahead," Blackout continued, ignoring Marcus's protests completely. "Let's finish this."
THE COMMAND CENTER WAS A NIGHTMARE.
Twenty B1 Battle Droids. Four B2 Super Battle Droids. Two Droidekas. And, standing in the center of it all like the universe's worst surprise party, a Geonosian command staff of six, including what appeared to be a high-ranking military officer with an impressive set of wings and an even more impressive-looking sonic pike.
"Well," Marcus said, surveying the scene through a crack in the door, "we're completely banthafodder."
"We've faced worse odds," Blackout said.
"Have we? Have we really?"
"No. No, we haven't. This is definitely the worst odds I've ever seen." Blackout paused. "But we're doing it anyway. For the Republic."
"For the Republic," the other clones echoed, their voices grim but determined.
And despite everything—despite the fear, despite the absurdity of his situation, despite the fact that he was a Cheeto-eating nerd from another dimension who had absolutely no business being in a firefight—Marcus found himself saying the words too.
"For the Republic."
They breached the door with a thermal detonator—the explosion blowing the entrance off its hinges and catching two of the B1 droids in the blast—and then everything dissolved into chaos.
Marcus moved on instinct, his body flowing through the combat like water, his blaster firing again and again and again. He shot a B1 in the head, spun to put two bolts into another one's torso, dove behind a console as a Super Battle Droid's fire scorched the air where he'd been standing. He came up throwing a grenade—when had he grabbed a grenade?—and the detonation took out three more droids and forced the Geonosian officer to take cover.
Scatter was a blur of motion beside him, his rifle barking in controlled bursts that were almost musical in their precision. Blackout fought with his one good arm, his blaster pistol—he'd switched to a sidearm when his rifle had been damaged—spitting death at everything that wasn't wearing white armor.
One of the Droidekas unfurled from its wheel-mode, its shields flickering to life, its cannons beginning to spin up—
—and a blue lightsaber blade came through the ceiling.
The Droideka didn't even have time to react before the saber had carved through its shield generator and bisected it neatly in two, the halves of the droid sparking and dying as they toppled in opposite directions.
Marcus looked up.
Standing in the hole that had been cut through the ceiling—standing on nothing, just floating there like gravity was a suggestion—was a Jedi.
Not just any Jedi.
A Togruta female, her skin orange and white, her montrals and lekku still short with youth, her eyes fierce with a determination that seemed to burn brighter than her lightsaber. She was young—maybe fourteen, fifteen at most—but she moved with a confidence that belied her age, dropping from the ceiling into the midst of the remaining droids like a predator descending on prey.
Her lightsaber sang through the air, a continuous blur of blue light that carved through Battle Droids like they were made of paper. She deflected blaster bolts back at their sources with casual precision, her free hand coming up to shove a Super Battle Droid across the room with a pulse of Force energy that made the air shimmer.
Marcus knew who this was.
Of course he knew who this was.
This was Ahsoka Tano.
Padawan to Anakin Skywalker. Future leader of the Siege of Mandalore. One of the most beloved characters in all of Star Wars, period, full stop, end of discussion.
And she was currently saving his life.
"FOCUS, TROOPER!" Blackout shouted, snapping Marcus out of his stunned reverie. "Help the Commander!"
Right. Right! Helping. He could help.
Marcus raised his blaster and started firing at the remaining droids, adding his firepower to the clones' assault while Ahsoka—Commander Tano, he should probably think of her as Commander Tano—carved her way through the enemy ranks with terrifying efficiency.
The battle was over in less than two minutes.
When the last droid fell—a Super Battle Droid that Ahsoka had gutted with a single thrust of her saber—Marcus found himself standing in a room full of sparking wreckage and spent blaster gas, his heart pounding, his hands still shaking, his brain slowly processing the fact that he had just fought alongside one of his favorite fictional characters of all time.
"Good work, troopers," Ahsoka said, deactivating her lightsaber and clipping it to her belt. Her voice was younger than Marcus remembered from the show—higher, less confident, still bearing the marks of someone who hadn't yet grown into the warrior she would become. "We need to secure this data before reinforcements arrive. Status report?"
Blackout stepped forward, his wounded arm cradled against his chest. "Sergeant Blackout, 501st Legion. We've got wounded, Commander, but we accomplished the objective. The data should be—"
"Already on it," Ahsoka said, moving to the main console with the kind of ease that suggested she'd done this before. "R7, I need a connection to the main databanks. Start the download."
A small astromech droid that Marcus hadn't even noticed—he'd been a little distracted by the Jedi descending from the ceiling—rolled out from behind one of the destroyed consoles, whistling an affirmative.
Marcus watched the scene unfold with a surreal sense of detachment.
This was really happening.
He was really here.
He was a clone trooper in the Grand Army of the Republic, fighting in the Clone Wars, standing in the same room as Ahsoka kriffing Tano while she downloaded enemy intelligence from a crashed Separatist command ship.
His life—his new life—was completely, utterly, absolutely insane.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, past the terror and the exhaustion and the lingering disbelief, Marcus felt something that might have been excitement.
Because yeah, this was dangerous. Yeah, he was probably going to die. Yeah, the entire war was ultimately pointless because Palpatine was orchestrating both sides and Order 66 was going to happen and the Republic was going to fall and everything the clones were fighting for was doomed to failure.
But also?
He was in Star Wars.
And that was kind of amazing.
THE BATTLE OF GEONOSIS ENDED TWELVE HOURS LATER.
Marcus had no clear memory of most of it. The fighting had continued long after they'd secured the command ship, waves of droids and Geonosians pushing against the Republic lines in a desperate attempt to drive the clone army back. He had fought until his blaster's power cell ran dry, then fought some more with a weapon scavenged from a fallen squadmate, then fought some more with his bare hands when even that had failed.
By the end, he was more dead than alive—slumped against a chunk of rubble, his armor cracked and blackened, his body screaming with a dozen different injuries that the battlefield medics had slapped bacta patches on and called "good enough."
But he was alive.
Somehow, impossibly, against all odds, he was alive.
"Hey. Scorch."
Marcus looked up to find Scatter standing over him, the other clone's armor in almost as bad shape as his own. In his hand, he held two field ration packs—the kind that tasted like cardboard and despair but contained enough calories to keep a clone trooper functioning for another few hours.
"You look like a bantha sat on you," Scatter observed.
"Feel like it too," Marcus admitted, accepting one of the ration packs with a hand that shook only slightly. "Thanks."
They ate in silence, watching the sun set over the Geonosian landscape. The fighting had stopped—for now, at least—and the only sounds were the distant rumble of Republic gunships ferrying troops and equipment, and the occasional crack of blasterfire as cleanup squads dealt with remaining pockets of droid resistance.
"Blackout's putting you in for a commendation," Scatter said eventually. "That thing you did with the Super Battle Droid. Says it saved the squad."
"I was trying not to die," Marcus said. "That's not exactly heroic."
"Worked, didn't it?" Scatter shrugged, the movement looking strange on a body that was identical to Marcus's own. "Besides, we don't get to choose what counts as heroic. We just do the job and hope someone notices."
Marcus thought about that for a moment.
He thought about Ahsoka, and the way she'd fought with a fire that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than training. He thought about Blackout, and the way he'd kept leading even with his arm hanging useless at his side. He thought about all the clones who hadn't made it—the ones who had died in the gunship crash, the ones who had fallen to artillery fire, the ones who were still lying on the battlefield because there hadn't been time to recover their bodies.
He thought about Order 66.
He thought about what he knew—what he remembered, from a life that felt increasingly like a dream—about how this war would end, and what would happen to the clones when it did.
"Hey, Scatter," he said.
"Yeah?"
"What do you think happens when the war's over? After we win, I mean. What do you think happens to us?"
Scatter was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was thoughtful, almost wistful.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Nobody's really told us. I guess... I guess I always figured we'd find out when we got there." He turned to look at Marcus, his helmet's visor reflecting the dying light of the Geonosian sun. "Why? You got plans or something?"
Marcus thought about control chips. About inhibitor chips, implanted in every clone's brain, designed to override free will and turn loyal soldiers into mindless executioners. He thought about the Jedi—about Ahsoka and the hundreds of others who trusted the clones with their lives, who fought beside them, who cared about them—and what would happen when the chips were activated.
He thought about whether there was anything he could do about it.
He thought about whether he even should do anything about it, given that his knowledge came from a fictional narrative and might not apply to the reality he now inhabited.
He thought about how completely, utterly, and absolutely screwed he was.
"Yeah," Marcus said finally, forcing a smile that his squadmate couldn't see behind his helmet. "Something like that."
The sun sank below the horizon, and the first stars began to appear in the Geonosian sky.
Somewhere out there, Count Dooku was escaping with the Death Star plans. General Grievous was waiting to make his entrance into the war. Chancellor Palpatine was manipulating events with the patience of a spider at the center of an impossibly vast web.
And Marcus Chen—Scorch, CT-7829, reincarnated Star Wars nerd and currently very confused clone trooper—was sitting on a pile of rubble, eating a ration pack that tasted like cardboard, and trying very hard not to think about everything that was going to go wrong.
He was completely screwed.
But at least he was alive.
For now.
END CHAPTER 1