Arla Fett had been a whisper in the corridors of a dozen Separatist councils for years. She wore the face they needed: a cultured envoy, a patron of trade, a hand that signed concessions and smiled when she needed to. Underneath, she catalogued names, routes, safe houses, and storage depots an atlas of the Confederacy's supply chains that read like a map of their lifeblood.
She arrived at Sundari's private planning chamber just before dawn, rain from Mandalore's late-season showers still beading on her pauldron. She did not remove her helmet; it was a courtesy she reserved for family. Shepard rose from the head of the table and met her eyes immediately. There was no theatrics between them only the hard, efficient language of people who had trained in war.
"You found them," Shepard said.
Arla's reply was a single datapad pushed forward on the table. Holographic lines unspooledstark, efficient names with orbital coordinates, garrison sizes, and cargo manifests.
"Five major depots," she said. "Four in neutral systems run by shell corporations, one under direct oversight of the Techno Union. They hold titanium-alloy blends, tibanna canisters, rare duralloy plates, and a cache of stabilized plasma cores. Enough for months of fabrication for the Separatist drive. They rotate shipments on a fifteen-day cycle. Convoys use daylight hyperspace windows and are lightly escorted most of the real security is digital." Her voice was casual, almost bored. The gravity of what she'd handed over was not lost on her.
Shepard scanned the list, fingertip tracing each world name. He did not speak immediately. He imagined the factories these stocks fed, the weapons they powered, the fleets they enabled. Mandalore needed metal and fuel as surely as breath. Those resources meant not just survival, but speed carriers built faster, Spartans trained and equipped, fields that fed more mouths.
"Which is most accessible?" he asked.
Arla tapped a sequence. One planet's holo blinked brighter than the rest. "Veshar Prime. Coreward but poorly cataloged in the Senate database private mining leases hide it. Transfer windows bring shipments directly to an orbital depot called Lattice Nine. It's shielded by a tech-smoke screen and a commercial facade. Security is mostly automated; human oversight is minimal. If we strike it during the convoy transfer, we can take everything and be gone before they mobilize an actual fleet."
Shepard's jaw softened for a heartbeat not in surprise, but in the cold satisfaction that follows a correct calculation. "We don't hit them for glory. We hit them for materials, and we take them clean. Minimal blood, minimal signal. The clans can use the supplies without anyone tracing a direct hand back to Mandalore."
"Will the council approve?" Arla asked.
He looked toward the chamber's windows where the Halo Array's rings glinted like distant moons. "They will. Present the list, and tell them our terms: quick strike, surgical, no political posturing. We bring the cargo in and move on. No declarations. No open involvement."
The Council
The Great Hall was fuller than usual. Holo-ink projections of supply lines, convoys, and orbital schematics rolled across the circular table. Shepard stood before it like an executioner deciding mercy.
"This is not raiding for sport," Shepard said to the elders and clan leaders. "This is insurance. The war will go on. We will not starve because others profit. We will not be dependent on the Republic or the Confederacy for our bones."
He laid out Arla's list in detail. Veshar Prime. Myrro IX. The Moons of Telun. The Techno Vault at Sevaris. Lattice Nine's orbital vaults two hundred and four containers of high-grade alloys, four dozen tibanna canisters, and a stockpile of fusion cells. Numbers scrolled and landed in the councilors' minds like stones in a pond each creating concentric ripples of consequence.
Questions came who would lead, what assets would be used, how to cover the operation. The answers were quick and precise.
"The Prowler will run comms and make the initial insertion," Arla said. "Its stealth is near-perfect if we time the thermal cycles right. A fast task force of three Infinity escorts, two frigate squadrons, and a mid-sized boarding corvette. Spartans in two teams: one for ship-side boarding, one for ground insertion onto the depot. Drone swarms to cut the depot's external sensors and loop their logs for ninety prime minutes. Rhal's slipwrights can forge false manifest signatures to make the cargo read as inter-corporate redistribution."
Shepard nodded. "We will use the matter engines to fabricate temporary cargo holds inside the Prowler and the corvettes. Load out, depart with minimal signatures, and push the convoy back towards a shadow route we control. No trace to Mandalore."
Clan leaders studied their hands, and one by one they nodded. War had taught them to value survival over virtue.
"Make it so," said the Matriarch of Ordo. "But not a single civilian can die for this."
A clause the council could all defend. Shepard accepted it with a simple tilt of his head.
The Fleet Moves
The Prowler slipped through space like a knife without a sound. Its hull shimmered as the cloaking systems reached a delicate temperature required to mask radial scans. Jango sat in the command chair, fingers resting casually near the console. He had left Kamino landscapes scorred from training and returned to the scale of strategy this mission suited him. He would not be the tipped blade for this operation, but his hands steadied the ship's steps.
"Shepard's plan is clean," Jango said into his comms to Arla, who monitored the convoy route feeds. "We hit Lattice Nine as the transfer opens, take the loot, and ghost."
The Infinity escorts hung back in tactical orbit, sensors passive but calibrated to alert only if something of Prime-level mass attempted to jump the convoy window. Frigates drifted in silent formation, engines humming at whisper. The Spartan squads two dozen of the newly enhanced sheathed in matte beskar, flexed in their containment pods with a mixture of military focus and ritual readiness. These were not mere soldiers; they were the spear-head of a reborn people.
At Shepard's command, the Prowler dove into the transfer lane, phasing out of sight as convoy station transponders logged a standard business signature. The depot's automated checks pinged the ship as friendly; the cargo transfer sequence began with the clumsy efficiency of a well-oiled, bureaucratic machine.
Lattice Nine
Lattice Nine looked like a commercial hub docking arms, corporate banners, and a flurry of contracted workers on its gantries. But under that facade, its vaults were cold and precise, rows upon rows of containers humming with energy.
The timing was everything. Arla's feed showed the internal security cycle: forty-seven seconds of elevated sensor sweeps followed by a five minute diagnostic lull. The drone swarms hit right after the sweep ended. Lightless insects of Mandalorian make, they crawled across hulls, dipping into seams and vomiting code.
"Now," Shepard breathed.
Spartans ejected from corvettes on thermic lines, cutting through the air below like pale comets. Their grapnel anchors bit into the docking lattice. Plasma cutters whispered at container locks. Where necessary, they used EMP blades to disable sentry arrays and lock the doors in a sequence that masked their access as authorized maintenance.
On the bridge, Jango piloted the Prowler through micro-gaps in the security net. Arla's voice was a shard of calm in his ear.
"Manifest signatures forged. Sensor logs looped for ninety-two minutes. We have enough time to pull everything and leave."
The boarding team was surgical. Containers opened to reveal glinting metal, rows of secured canisters, and crates labeled with corporate codes that meant nothing to Mandalorian mouths. The Spartans worked in smooth, practiced steps heavy-lift drones accepting cargo, servo-arms folding them into fabricated holds that reconfigured as living compartments.
An automated maintenance drone tried to raise an alarm. A Spartan's blade found its power core in a breath, and the unit died before it could blink.
The operation was not without risk. A patrol of private security droids diverted toward the gantry too late to disrupt the first wave but enough to draw the Prowler's escorts into brief combat. Lasers lanced the void. Frigates answered with suppressive fire, burning out the droid matrices before they could call in reinforcements.
Minutes stretched like hours. The last crate sealed, and the drone swarms reversed their sweep in precise choreography, patching back the sensor gaps as if nothing had happened.
Then the Prowler slipped away cargo holds full, the Infinity escorts cloaked and melting into safe lanes. The convoys at Lattice Nine continued their punctilious paperwork, the depot's logs reporting a normal transfer. No trace led back to Mandalore.
Return and Reckoning
When the fleet arrived in the system and the cargo was unloaded under heavy escort into Mandalore's subterranean forges, the weight of it was visible. Crates were opened. Tibanna canisters hissed into containment, alloys glinted in the forge light. Rhal's engineers wept quietly at the metallurgy materials that would have taken months to refine, now available in weeks.
At the council that night, Shepard did not revel. He walked the hallways of the forges, hands on railings, listening to the songs of hammers, the low undercurrent of life returning to gears. The supplies had changed the calculus of his people: shipyards would ramp ahead of schedule, shield capacitors could be built in surplus, and the Spartan brigades would receive armor upgrades that made them faster and deadlier.
He looked at Arla and Jango, at the matriarchs and field captains. They were not only celebrating what they had taken. They were weighing what this meant for their future.
"You did well," Shepard said quietly to Arla later, when the hall was empty and the only sound was the slow tick of cooling conveyors.
She lifted her chin beneath the visor. "We didn't take from people. We took from a machine that feeds war for profit. Mandalore feeds its people."
He stared at the Halo rings outside the window, silhouettes against a starlit canvas.
"If Palpatine's nets tighten, the galaxy will shrink," he said. "We must be ready to feed ourselves, protect ourselves, and if necessary create a corridor where others may find refuge."
Arla's smile was small, sharp. "And when the time comes, we will decide who lives by the rules we set."
Shepard did not answer. He watched the carriers in the distance frames becoming ships and felt the arithmetic of power settling into place. The theft at Lattice Nine had not been an act of theft alone; it had been a declaration. Mandalore would not beg. It would provision itself.
Outside, the Halo Array rotated slowly, an indifferent predator in orbit. Inside, the forges sang the new songs of metal and life. The galaxy flamed on its distant edges, and the Fett siblings prepared for whatever came next quietly, inexorably, their hands steady on the wheel.
The Halo Array hung in orbit like five sleeping leviathans cold arcs of alloy and beskar, embedded with the crystalline cores fed from stellar matter and humming with a physics that felt older than Mandalorian myths. Up close, you could see the engineering poetry: convergent emitters spaced at precise longitudes, conductor veins running between the plates, micro-fusion wells glowing like captive suns. For months the moon-yard had been building them, the nanite forges stitching machine to machine until the frames were whole. Tonight, at Shepard's order, they would wake.
The test would be surgical. No planet would burn. No city would be leveled. They had not come to play tyrant. Mandalore needed deterrence, not genocide. The Array's designers had made sure of that the cores could be tuned for output ranges from a diagnostic whisper all the way up to world-shaping discharges. Tonight's trial was a diagnostic: a focused energy pulse meant to simulate a directed strike at asteroid-class mass, verify resonance harmonics, and validate the control lattices. If it performed as designed, the Array could lay waste to an incoming fleet's staging node enough to remove their tactical advantage without invoking wholesale annihilation.
Shepard's team had argued for a thousand contingencies. He had listened to each engineers, ethicists, clan matriarchs, his brother. In the end he issued the one order that mattered: test, no leak, no second-guessing.
A small, lifeless rock sat on the projection table: designated target ATH-9C, a captured Kuiper body dragged from a distant system for this purpose. Its graphite-gray hull was pocked with microcraters. Within the cargo bay of an unmarked corvette, the asteroid was sterile, devoid of organics and declared safe by the forges' bio-holo sweepers. It was the perfect sacrificial stone.
"Power coupling at ninety-eight percent," Rhal reported, voice steady as the plasma readouts on the console. The chief engineer's face was lit by the blue wash of telemetry. Beside him, the Array's control cluster hummed, a lattice of interfaces and safety keys physical locks, quantum locks, living biometric seals. Shepard had insisted on three keys: his, Jango's, and the council's quorum seal. Tonight, he held his thumb over the final reader.
Arla stood to his right, arms folded, visor up so he could see the muscles working in her jaw. She had been the one to bring the data that allowed them to build these rings theft of a thousand secrets, then refinement and she carried the guilt and purpose of it in equal measure. Jango hovered at the edge of the bridge like a predator out of time. He said little; when he spoke it was a one-syllable confirmation and Shepard knew the man would carry the memory of this night forever.
"Engage test vector Alpha," Shepard said.
The Array's emitters aligned with a sound like ice cracking. The hum deepened, and the orbital sky rippled with the mesh of applied fields. On the monitor, a tracer beam lanced through vacuum toward ATH-9C. The ring's feedback loop pulsed once, twice, then settled.
Telemetry streamed in a river of numbers. Frequency lock green. Resonant damping green. Energy dispersion nominal. Shepard scanned the readouts, aware of every variable the engineers had fed him, every expected spike and acceptable excursion. There were margins for error, but he had never been fond of margins. He wanted certainty.
At three seconds, an audible tone chimed through the bridge. The beam tightened. On the projection ATH-9C's surface, heat mapped in false colors violet, white the micro-fissures widening as stress lines formed. For an instant the rock glowed like a second moon.
"Pulse," Rhal said.
It struck with the silence of winter a clean, concussive bloom of energy that didn't scream but rearranged matter. ATH-9C did not explode in fireworks. It unstitched itself. Crystalline veins liquefied, melted into a coherent stream of vapor, ionized dust that the Array's sweepers drew into containment. The projection showed the mass reducing, the vector of debris neatly shepherded into the holding field. Telemetry sang that the containment grid had captured ninety-nine point nine percent of liberated mass. A whisper of dust drifted on the monitor and then the display read zero. The test was complete.
Shepard exhaled, deeper than he intended. The weight lifted from his shoulders was small and private; no grandu-pheaval, only the recognition that the machine did what it was built to do.
"Diagnostics?" he asked.
Rhal's grin was rare, half-astonishment and half-relief. "All systems nominal. Efficiency margins exceeded design expectations by twelve percent. The harmonics show a stable fire envelope at tactical and strategic scales. We can modulate to nonlethal levels if needed, and retain the capacity for strategic yields."
Arla stepped forward, fingers tracing the air over the projection as if she could touch the results. "You pulled a lot of power for that pulse," she said. "Transmission rings put out a signature; the sweepers cleaned the trail, but someone with the right sensors would have seen that. We'll need the obfuscation layers on the Array's telemetry feed tightened."
Shepard watched the halo rings settle back into quiet. Even inert in orbit they felt alive. He was not untroubled. A weapon's worth was always matched by what it enabled and what it tempted.
"Seal the logs," Shepard ordered. "Encrypt with the triple-layer cipher, clone the decoys, and shove the primary signatures behind the produce manifests we already have. No one outside the council gets that file.
Jango inclined his head. "You'll want me in the loop, Shepard. If they build a counter, I'll find it." His voice carried both promise and threat.
"Of course," Shepard said. "You'll know the counters. We'll codify response protocols. But not one word leaves this room, not one intel packet. We do this to protect our people, not to parade it as proof."
He turned and looked at those assembled engineers, Spartans, clan leaders watching from the gallery, and Arla, who had become the spider in more webs than one. The silence in their faces was reverent and terrible. They had built a god-sized tool and tested it with the calmness of people who must be able to do what terrifying things make possible.
Outside the bridge, the city lights on Mandalore blinked like eyes. Somewhere in the forges, a child took their first steps on a floor warmed by the forge-fire. In the farms on Concordia fields tilted with early harvests. The test had been a promise to those lives a promise that they would not be ground beneath the heel of a starving war machine.
Shepard found himself thinking, not of triumph, but of accounting. He had built a deterrent with the same hand that took from empires. He had authorized the means to strike warships, to vaporize staging nodes, to erase a target without turning a whole world to ash. He had done so because the holonet, the HoloNet stories, the politics none of it would guarantee Mandalore's survival in the age to come. He had chosen control.
"Feed the results into training simulations," Shepard said at last. "Run every countermeasure spec. Build decoys, build redundancy. Turn what we have into a living doctrine."
Rhal's voice was soft as he shut down the display. "Will you ever fire it at a living world, Mand'alor?"
Shepard looked at the halo above and for a long moment did not answer. Then his voice found the smallest, coldest edge.
"Only if they give me no other choice."
He sealed the logs himself a fingertip, a breath, the hum of the Array's dormant coils like a heartbeat in the dark. The Halo Array had passed its test. The cost of that knowledge now lived with them all. The rest of the galaxy could keep bleeding itself for a while, thinking itself master of destiny. Mandalore had built a hand on the wheel and no one outside their gates would know exactly how tight its grip had become.