The Defector

Sezzid awoke with a start, his skin dripping with sweat. He'd had the dream again. He had been having it for the past week. It always started the same: he was marching down the center of Kaas City in formation with his unit. Then would come the child. The race and gender changed from night to night. One night it was a female Twi'lek slave, the next night a bright-eyed human boy, and the next a flippant Rattatakki girl. His Lieutenant would draw his rifle and strike the child. With the child on the ground he would search for the parents. Sometimes the parents came out, sometimes they didn't. Tonight they didn't. The Lieutenant scanned the crowd and not seeing any likely parents fired a stun round into the child. When several civilians moved to interfere he switched his rifle power setting to kill and turned to the crowd. All of the troopers, including Sezzid, followed suit. Sezzid tried with all of his might to alter the aim of his weapon but his muscles wouldn't respond. He fired into the crowd, killing at least three civilians with his unit overall killing 37.

He walked to the refresher to wash his face and calm his nerves. When he looked in the mirror he saw something he could be killed for having: fear. As the son of one of the Empire's top operatives, Cezzid Vizsla: the former Cipher Nine, and a Dark Council member, he was held to very high standards. He was expected to be ruthless and cunning like his parents, whom he didn't despise, but disagreed with. His father had tried to raise him to be an upstanding Imperial citizen and at the time it was legal, got him entered into the Imperial Academy on Dromund Kaas. The dream was trying to tell him something. Sezzid sat down and tried to figure it out. The common thread in all of his dreams were a child being struck by an Imperial officer and soldiers killing civilians. Both of those were 100% against his moral code. Sitting there on the refresher floor he decided to get out. He had to get to the Republic and enlist there. They had morals and stood for something he agreed with. He crept back into his room and packed his meager belongings: two changes of clothes, a pair of boots, and a piece of scorched wood on a chain. He had gotten it when he and his father had gone hunting in the Dromund Kaas forest and were almost struck by lightning. Hearing the guard coming by, Sezzid flattened himself to his bed and pretended to be asleep.

After the guard had passed, he leapt into action, scooping up his small carrying case and creeping down the hall in the opposite direction of the guard. He was almost to the hangar where he could make it away on a freighter when he heard voices: the Headmaster and his second-in-command to be exact. Realizing he would be killed for attempting to escape, he ducked into the next room. When he closed the door he realized exactly where he was: the museum. Surrounding him were relics from the Sith Empires of Darth Revan, Darth Malak, and Darth Nihilus. Thinking ahead and concluding that he would need a disguise to get across the hangar floor, he reached for the nearest set of armor: the suit of armor from a Sith footsoldier of Nihilus' time. He also came to the realization, with a chill, that had he not been forced to hide in this room, he would have walked into the hangar as himself and would have been caught. He pulled on the armor and quietly tested out the voice modulator. Finding that it sufficiently lowered his voice, Sezzid left the room and strutted purposefully into the hangar.

The few workers still on duty at this hour looked up at the sound of the doors opening, but seeing an Imperial soldier they went back to their work. Not being soldiers themselves they assumed that his different brand of armor simply meant he was of a higher rank and left him alone. They only took notice of him again when the freighter's engines fired up and the freighter took off. Sezzid was estatic, he was home free.

Then the klaxons began blaring. Unbeknownst to Sezzid, the Headmaster had instituted a sensor in the hangar doors that set off an alarm unless an override code only given to the highest ranked officers was transmitted. Cursing his arrogance, Sezzid began putting all of his training to the test avoiding the turbolaser blasts coming his way. Turning into a tight barrel roll that pushed the small freighter to its limits, he escaped atmosphere. Just as he was about to release a sigh of relief, his eyes widened in surprise. A Tyrant-class cruiser was blocking his path. As he began to execute evasive maneuvers, his ship stopped cold, as did his heart. It was over, the cruiser had captured him in its tractor beam.

He walked to the boarding ramp and prepared to be taken into custody. After a few minutes, he felt the shudder of pressure equalizing and the airlock door down the corridor opened. As Imperial Soldiers began filing into the small hallway, Sezzid raised his hands. As they put his hands in binders, he suddenly said, "You realize what you're promoting right? The slaughter of the citizens you took an oath to protect?" That stopped the trooper putting on his binders in his tracks.

"Excuse me?" he asked.

"You've heard the stories. The soldiers who murdered civilians because they got in the way of their formation, and the Sith are the embodiment of pure evil. There is a reason it's called the dark side of the force."

"Silence traitor!" bellowed the Captain in charge of the boarding action. "Cuff him," he commanded the trooper.

"No."

"What did you say? Was that insubordination?"

"Yes it was, you can take your Imperial righteousness and shove it where I'm about to stick my boot CAPTAIN" "Why you little!" fumed the Captain as he drew his blaster.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you SIR," said a voice from behind the officer with a very sarcastic tone. "I was happy living a farmer's life before you Imperial scumbags came through drafting every able bodied man. I left my wife with three kids!" It was the other soldier with the Captain.

"Yeah! You and your Sith masters killed my parents in a raid on "Republic" shipping lines. Then you forced me into this embodiment of what I despise. I'm out," said the original trooper.

"Me too," added the second.

Sezzid calmly walked up to the Captain and took his blaster, turned it on him, and dropped him with a single stun round. "Get him out of here. We have to leave NOW." The two troopers responded to his command as he returned to the cockpit. Not even a minute later they arrived as well. Detaching from the cruiser which had relaxed its tractor beam, they moved away from Dromund Kaas and jumped to hyperspace.

On the journey, Sezzid learned that the two men were Corporal Svip Hayyer and Private Logara Guedana. They took the little freighter to Republic space and turned themselves in to Republic authorities. After they had been processed, they went their separate ways with Sezzid and Logara enlisting and Svip taking a shuttle to get back to his family.

The Revelation

The sound of the explosions and racing flames broke Sezzid out of his stupor. What have I done? He thought. General Garza had ordered him to take out Imperial dropships at the cost of not stopping the Imperial firebombing of the residential district. As he and Lieutenant Elara Dorn watched, another building crumbled. They could hear the screams. I've become what I was determined to fight he realized.

In a fit of anger, he threw his Bowcaster on the ground and kicked it. Picking it up, he opened fire on the Imperials rushing his way. He cut them down, but was still just going through the motions. Never again will I lose sight of what's important he vowed. After the dust settled, he walked up to the crumpled remains of an apartment complex and picked up a small piece a rubble. Elara looked at him questioningly, but didn't say anything as he put it in a pouch on his belt.

The Decision

Back on his ship, the Bane of the Empire. Sezzid opened a locker in his cabin. In it he saw the assorted pieces of a set of Sith Triumvirate Trooper Armor. As he brushed the dust off, he began to disrobe himself of his Republic-issue armor. Once he was done, he began assembling the Sith armor around himself to act as a constant reminder of what he was fighting, and kept the small piece of rubble as a reminder of just how easy it was to lose sight of that.

Hope you liked it.