I scrambled back down toward the primary comms panel, avoiding Kael's blank, traumatized stare. I flicked the emergency toggles, trying to route the dying auxiliary battery directly to the transmitter.
A burst of aggressive, ear-shattering static spat from the speakers, crackling so loud Arachnae trilled nervously in my arm.
"Anything?" Kael asked hollowly.
"Just static," I muttered, twisting the dial back and forth, hunting for a clear frequency. "Could be that the exterior antenna is completely buried in whatever mud we just plowed into. Could be the internal wiring got fused during the landing." I paused, listening to the muffled drumming overhead. "Or maybe it's just whatever weather system is hammering us out there."
Either way, we were entirely cut off.
I looked around the cockpit. Emergency survival packs were strapped to the upper wall racks, currently suspended upside down due to the steep tilt. A pair of heavy blaster pistols rested in a locked compartment near the rear blast door.
I let Kael have his moment.
I looked away from the dead man and stared at the dark, tilted walls of our metal coffin. The Scythe was tough, but plowing into the ground at terminal velocity after a two-day hyperspace marathon had turned the chassis into a crumpled tin can. The repulsors were dead. The hyperdrive was fused.
But worst of all? We were empty. I had burned through Senator Organa's generous hypermatter refill just keeping us in the dimension of light. We had zero fuel. Even if I could miraculously pop out the dents and rewire the engines, we weren't flying anywhere.
And where exactly was 'here'?
The suffocating fog in the Force made it impossible to tell. I could vaguely sense the twisted shadows of trees in the downpour outside. Was there a civilization? A primitive species? Or was this one of the millions of dead rocks the galaxy casually ignored? If this was an uncharted rock, fixing the ship wouldn't matter.
It pained me to admit it, but I couldn't lone-wolf this. We needed a ride off this mudball.
My fingers slipped against the pouches of my utility belt until they found my encrypted comm device. I pulled the small cylinder free, popped the cap, and jammed the activation stud.
Krrrrzhkkkk-ssshhh.
Nothing but aggressive, wet static.
"Great," I muttered, shaking the device.
It felt like the same deal as the ship's comm array. Atmospheric interference. Whatever storm system was currently hammering the hull was loaded with ionic charge, completely scrambling the local frequency spectrum.
If I wanted this to work, I had to punch a signal all the way out into space. Interstellar comms essentially piggybacked on the HoloNet—an impossibly massive, galaxy-wide web of hyperwave transceivers sitting in hyperspace, instantly moving information through s-threads. The Empire monitored it, of course, but 'life finds a way' if you know the right back-channels.
That was assuming we were even in charted territory. If my blind joyride had dumped us out in the Unknown Regions, we were well and truly kriffed.
But I couldn't just throw up a blind distress beacon and pray. If an open signal reached an orbital station, relay buoy, or a random ship, anyone listening could instantly track us. Signal direction, timing, strength decay, Doppler shift... they would triangulate our position in minutes.
If Vader's flagship had managed to map our hyperspace wake before we jumped, they already had a general idea of our exit vector. Pinging blindly out here was like lighting a flare in a dark room full of hungry predators.
I had to send a highly targeted, heavily encrypted burst. Just to Bail.
And for that, I actually needed to tell him where the hell we were.
I dragged myself up the inclined deck, moving back toward the front console. The primary nav-computer.
The casing had completely warped from the heat, the durasteel blistering like burnt skin. Peering through the cracked chassis was an exercise in pure disappointment. Back in space, it had been a dying machine I could somehow miraculously string along. Now? It was a solidified puddle of extremely expensive slag. You would honestly have better luck booting up a toaster that had just been swallowed by a rancor.
Even if the core data log somehow survived inside the black box, digging it out, finding a clean interface, and routing external power to it would take days. Days we definitely didn't have while sitting blind and bleeding inside a mud-buried ship on a planet that felt like it actively wanted to digest us.
We had no map. No location.
I reached out against the warped exterior housing of the computer to give it a punch in frustation...but who knew this dying ship got hands.
Bzzzt.
A sharp, violent blue arc of electricity snapped out of a half-melted logic gate.
It completely bypassed my leather glove, striking the bare skin of my wrist with a bright crack.
"Ah—!"
I jerked my arm back, expecting the agonizing bite of high voltage which...never came.
What arrived instead was a sequence of raw, geometric symbols and numeric strings forcibly branded themselves across my retinas. Degrees. Minutes. Seconds. Hyper-spatial positioning telemetry. The exact galactic coordinates where the computer's quantum array had registered its final ping before atmospheric entry.
W-What?
The melted slag inside the console fizzled aggressively. A puff of acrid black smoke leaked out of the cracks, and the lingering blue sparks died out completely, rendering the entire thing nothing more than dead weight.
My knees instantly buckled.
A sudden, wave of physical weakness hollowed me out, scraping the absolute bottom of my already empty reserves. I collapsed heavily against the edge of the console, gasping for air as my vision swam. The coordinate numbers were still violently flashing behind my closed eyelids like a burned-in screen.
"What the kriff..." I wheezed, staring at my trembling right hand in the red emergency light. "What the actual fuck just happened?"
"W-what?" Kael asked, his head snapping up from Ryn's body. His eyes were wide and hollow.
For a moment I was about to tell him how the machine suddenly came alive and shoved data in my mind but looking at those eyes...
"No, nothing," I said quickly, shaking my hand out and pushing myself back to my feet.
The ship doing eerie shit aside, I realized that I needed to give him a job. If he sat there staring at his dead friend, shock and despair were going to eat him alive.
"Actually, you know what? Can you check the hangar doors' manual override back there?" I pointed up the angled floor toward the rear bulkhead. "The primary power is totally cut up here. Meanwhile, I'm going to see what we can scavenge from the consoles. I have an idea to bypass the atmospheric interference..."
Kael blinked, his brain clearly struggling to process the basic instructions. Eventually, he gave a slow, mindless nod. He awkwardly turned around, hooking his good arm around a pipe to begin the steep, grueling climb up the slanted deck.
Left alone, I stared at my hand for another long moment. I tentatively reached out, pressing my fingers against the melted nav-computer casing again, bracing myself for another miraculous data-dump.
Nothing. Not even a mild static shock. The metal was just dead and cooling.
I sighed, chalking it up to another terrifying mystery of the Force, and reached for the laser-cutter attached to my belt.
It was funny, in a dark, twisted sort of way. My original plan back on Alderaan had been to tear this ship apart and sell her components for scrap. She had narrowly escaped that fate, just to haul us across the galaxy and deliver herself right back to my scavenging hands on whatever miserable swamp planet this was.
I reached out and affectionately patted the cracked durasteel dash.
"Thanks for the ride," I murmured. "You might have been an Inquisitorious bitch, but you were a lovable one."
_____
The rain coming down on us felt ridiculously heavy, like someone was trying to drown the entire continent with a firehose.
It wasn't until I had physically stepped out of the Scythe and taken a lungful of the actual air that my brain finally translated the horrible, oily static clouding my senses.
It was the Dark Side.
Not a residue, or lingering echo from some old battle. The entire planet was absolutely drowning in it. Aside from the suffocating, freezing terror that bled off Darth Vader back on Alderaan, I had never felt so much pure, concentrated malice in one place. It soaked into the mud. It radiated from the twisted bark of the trees.
I looked up at the torrential black sky and mentally flipped off whatever cosmic entity was directing my life. Really? After flying blind for two days, we couldn't just crash on a nice, quiet beach planet with primitive locals and a decent fruit supply? The universe literally never missed an opportunity to screw me over.
Our crash landing had carved a brutal, jagged clearing through the dense canopy. Through the opening above, the dark storm clouds swirled in a violent vortex. But outside this tiny crater? The swampy forest formed an impenetrable wall of black.
My emergency flashlight cut a weak, trembling cone of white light that barely reached five meters before getting swallowed by the gloom. Every few seconds, a flash of lightning would rip across the sky overhead, instantly illuminating the towering, unnatural silhouettes of the surrounding trees in stark monochrome before plunging us right back into absolute pitch-black.
When the thunder rolled a second later, the water pooled around my boots rippled violently.
I aimed my flashlight down at the fresh mound of sloppy, wet mud at our feet. Propped up at the head of the grave was a jagged slab of durasteel I'd ripped from the ship's bulkhead. The scorched, uneven letters I had just burned into the metal with my laser-cutter were already getting washed over by the storm.
Ryn.
[45 BBY - 9 BBY.]
[A faithful partner, an loving father and a honest friend]
Cradled in my arms, Arachnae twitched her functional right legs. Her eight red optic sensors glowed softly in the oppressive dark, a cluster of eerie crimson dots bobbing in the gloom. She clicked her front mandibles together, letting out a nervous little ticking sound that was quickly swallowed by the rain.
Kael stood on the other side of the grave, staring blankly at the carved metal. He had his good hand clamped tightly over the crude splint I'd fashioned for his broken arm out of a co-pilot seat bracket and an excessive amount of medical tape. He just looked totally hollowed out. His flashlight beam bounced erratically across the wet, tangled roots caging us in because his hand wouldn't stop shaking.
"We... we should say something, right?" Kael mumbled, his voice barely carrying over the downpour. "Like, um, a prayer to the Maker or... or something."
"If you know one, go ahead," I told him, wiping a steady stream of cold rainwater out of my eyes. "I think the Maker and I have some conflicting schedules lately."
Kael closed his eyes and bowed his head, murmuring a few quiet lines in an Alderaanian dialect I didn't recognize.
"Okay," Kael finally breathed out, opening his eyes and wiping his wet face with his sleeve. "What now? Like... what is the actual plan here? Because sitting out here in the dark feels like a really fast way to join him."
"We move," I said. "We need to get above the atmospheric interference. That means finding high ground. A mountain, a massive tree, a cliff face. We hike up, rig the signal amplifier I ripped out of the console, and punch our distress coordinates to Senator Organa."
"Hike up..." Kael looked around at the claustrophobic wall of dark, menacing trees surrounding us, laughing a brittle, humorless sound. "We can't even see the sky! How are we supposed to know which way is up?"
"Just follow me," I said, gesturing for Arachnae to stay close. "And keep your light aimed at the ground. This place feels like it collects things that bite."
Just as I turned to step over a massive, moss-covered root, I felt it.
A tremor.
I paused, freezing mid-step. "Did... did you feel that?"
"Feel what?" Kael asked, swiveling his flashlight nervously. "I don't feel anything except cold and wet."
I ignored him, dropping down onto one knee and pressing my bare palm flat against the saturated mud. I squeezed my eyes shut, actively pushing my hyper-perception down through the dark side interference and into the earth itself.
There it was.
Thump.
A faint, rhythmic seismic vibration. I held my breath, mapping the microscopic ripples traveling through the bedrock. Two seconds passed.
Thump.
It was coming from the east. Deep within the absolute blackness of the tree line. And analyzing the microscopic variance in the frequency... the vibration was getting stronger. By a tiny fraction, but undeniably stronger.
Of course. Of course a giant monster is coming to eat us right after we survived a hyper-speed blind jump.
My grip subconsciously tightened around the metal cylinder of Hett's lightsaber clipped to my belt. I pulled my hand out of the mud and immediately stood up.
"We need to move. Now."
"Move where?" Kael stammered, taking a step backward as he caught the sudden shift in my tone.
"Anywhere but here," I said quickly, snapping my detachable backpack over my shoulders. "Something massive is coming this way, and I absolutely do not want to be standing here to sign for the delivery."
"Wait—how do you know that?!" Kael's voice hitched an octave. "You literally just touched the dirt!"
"I'll tell you on the way," I grabbed Arachnae, carefully cradling her damaged chassis against my chest with my left arm. "It's a lot to unpack, and frankly, you probably won't even believe me. Let's go!"
Kael didn't argue further. The sheer panic in my voice was apparently convincing enough. He gave Ryn's grave one last solemn nod before awkwardly hefting the main survival pack over his good shoulder. The bag contained about seventy percent of our salvaged rations, the bulky comms amplifier, and a few medical kits.
He slung one of the heavy blaster pistols we grabbed from the armory over his back by the strap. I had the other heavy blaster hanging freely from the side of my smaller tool pack.
"Keep as close to me as you can," I warned him, stepping out of the relative safety of the crash crater and crossing into the dense, suffocating canopy. "It's way too easy to get lost in this dark. And Force knows what sort of Sith-spawn are festering in this kriffing swamp."
[To Be Continued]
A/N: Got a bit late eating dinner :P
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