#echofox

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The chute looks like one of any others. The LAAT/i hovers over the dark void, tiny against its huge gaping maw. Most of the sector is closed off to traffic, the buildings all around it dark and dead. The gunship’s floodlights try their best to cut through the thick darkness that seems to surround the entrance, but they only succeed in underlining it, in making it look bigger and darker. Echo wraps his right hand around one of ceiling straps and looks down: strong winds, heavy with humidity and the familiar smell of Coruscant’s Lower Levels, climb up from the chute and hit him in the face. 

At his back, Commander Fox shifts. Echo has yet to see his face. He was quiet for most of the trip there, now and then giving orders to the pilot in the cockpit with a low, croaky voice. Echo ignores him and keeps his eyes on the tunnel as the gunship starts making its slow way down, the sound of its engines echoing eerily. Echo puts on his bucket and switches on the filters.

For the longest time Echo thought it was just a trooper tale, the kind the veterans used to try and scare them. Tales about the angels of Iego; tales about ghostly number stations, sending out codes in long-dead languages; the asteroid sirens, and the walking dead troopers that knocked on your tent or approached you during your guard shifts, nothing within their shells but air and hunger.

But it is very real: a whole area in Coruscant that’s been closed to most of its population for generations, ever growing. Echo leans further out of the gunship, looks down: he can’t quite imagine what could have brought Fives to think that venturing into this place was his best option.

The LAAT/i lands on a deserted public hangar, decades-old trash flying into the dark. The commander’s the first to jump off the ship; Echo follows, vaguely annoyed about being second. They are joined by a small squad of troopers, most of them wearing the scuffed red and white of Corrie veterans. Once the last one is on the cracked tarmac, the larty flies away, leaving them in the dark. Echo clicks the night vision on and starts making his way towards the terminal to the side, scomp link ready.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Echo pauses and turns to look at the commander. His men are at his back, and Echo can feel the weight of their regard, four identical black visors staring at him from the dark. 

Commander Fox of the Coruscant Guard doesn’t want him there. He’s a remarkably quiet man, seemingly content to do his job and follow the rules, but he tried his very best to keep Echo off the team. But General Skywalker insisted. 

Echo read the mission dossier, and then he did a bit of research of his own. He knows why the commander doesn’t want him to connect to the sector mainframe: he can’t say he cares.

Commander Fox would have killed Fives—from what Rex told Echo, he almost did. 

“Respectfully, sir—I know what I’m doing,” Echo tells him, trying his best to keep his voice as even and bland as polite as he knows how. It’s still as easy as he remembered. 

The commander tilts his head. Echo waits, and then waits some more. When Commander Fox says nothing, the rest of the squad standing quiet and very still at his back, Echo rolls his eyes and turns back to the terminal.

It’s an old model, at least a couple decades out of fashion, but it should do. 

The click-and-flash of his brain and the machine’s touching is both incredibly familiar and profoundly alienating. Echo pushes through the tangled knot of disgust and comfort and lets his consciousness spread out throughout the sector’s dead mainframe, expecting little and finding less. 

And then—