The loading arms retracted, the clamps released, and Iowi's ship, its engines came to life as I lifted it into the sky, leaving the planet behind us. Seeing the cityscape go, Vila leaned back in the copilot's chair, fingers flicking across the holo-controls. At the same time, HK buzzed behind us, still trying to overlay the information we had gained from the defeated Sith droid onto local starmaps. He wasn't convinced that 'the Force will show the way' was going to work... Ignoring him, I keyed in the last of the official codes so we could leave without being pursued, then opened a comm line to Lando. His voice told us that he was probably smoking a cigar and drinking, maybe feeling relieved we were leaving, yet he was also looking offended in the most theatrical way possible.
"Well," he began, being overly dramatic, "I see how it is. I bust my back helping you, Jedi. I even get into trouble quietly for you all, and you leave without even stopping by for a goodbye kiss on the cheek. Truly... Truly! I am wounded."
"Sure you are," Vila muttered, smirking, rolling her eyes, "Then why do I hear celebratory champagne bottles being opened in the background?"
"That is not relevant information, my dear," Lando sniffed. "The point is: I expect at least one souvenir. Preferably something not cursed, haunted, or screaming through the Dark Side, if at all possible."
"Aren't you going to ask for money?" Vila shot back, "You did tell us that... That Grandmaster Skywalker will compensate you."
"Maybe." He chuckled, making me shrug. "But I always like to make my new friends remember me!"
"No promises," I said with a small smile. "We are going to a place that probably is not the best for business."
[Clarification: The probability of returning with something cursed is eighty-seven percent. Ninety-two if Meatbag Kael insists on touching things.]
"HK," I groaned. "When have I ever done that?"
"You know, your droid has a point," Lando groaned at the other side. "Still, at least bring me back a beach rock, then. Something safe. Something I can sell."
"We'll see what we can do," Vila said sweetly, giving up. "Don't worry, we won't forget your help. We also have to come back, our ship is still docked down there!"
"Don't worry, I'll take care of it until you return safe and sound... That's all I ask," he said, his voice softening into genuine warmth. "Take care of yourselves out there. And find your missing people! The Force may be with you all."
"We will be careful," I promised. "Thank you… for everything."
"Yes. And... The Force be with you, too," Vila answered, and soon, the call fizzled out and with it, the last connection to Cantonica was cut.
It was time to go, so I eased the throttle forward, picking up speed. It was then that I noticed that a smaller ship had picked up our trail, and I immediately knew it was Master Katarn's vessel, following us out, towards the edge of the Cantonica system, where his starfighter peeled off in the opposite direction, making a quiet jump past the system's outer buoys.
"May the Force be with you," Vila whispered under her breath, watching her Master's streak vanish. "So..." She exhaled, turning toward me. "Ready for the hard part?"
[Correction: The hard part is trusting Meatbag Kael to interpret mystical feelings as hyperspace coordinates.] HK sat down, perfectly upright behind me, arms folded before his chest.
"HK," Vila said tiredly, "let him focus."
"Want to make a bet, HK?" I asked, making him tilt his head a little, but in the end, his answer made me chuckle.
[Statement: No. Jedi cheat more than a droid at card counting.]
"Heh," I closed my eyes, shaking my head, "Then why are you so grumbly?"
I don't know if he had an answer in the end, because the moment I reached out to the Force, I felt lost in it. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I trusted myself and, more than that, I had trust in the Force, as the star map of the region appeared on the consoles. Still, it also materialized in my mind, like a holo full of empty voids, uncharted parts, dead ends, fragmented coordinates, and one blurry cluster of probabilities that HK had extracted from the DR-0N droid's corrupted memory.
I wasn't actually trying to overlay the different images in my head, knowing that part wouldn't work. Instead, I was trying to focus on the vision I had, on the feeling of that Sith Berserker, and on getting a link to his saber, and the destroyed droid's Dark Side feeling... And find it through the Force. Find their origin. As I was doing that, my mind scanning the hyperlanes, a cold wind suddenly blew past me from nowhere. It was like a low pulse, then it turned into the feeling of a forge, belonging to a memory that was not mine, but it resonated with my search, pressing into me through the Force. The moment it happened, I let the sensation wash over me, like I was reaching into a river's current, pressing my hand into the cold water, looking for its bottom...
Damn... It was so... cold. And I couldn't feel the bottom, only that my hand was starting to freeze, my breath also getting colder and colder... It began to hurt.
"Kael…" Vila said softly, and I heard her voice, helping to ease the cold as I felt her hand hold onto mine, "I've got you."
Relaxing and regaining control over my emotions, I let a thread of the Force tighten around the pulse, as if moving my hand under the current, and finally... I touched ground. In reality, I wasn't touching the bed of the cold river; I was submerging myself in it. Still, the navigational computer began flickering, and it was probably confused by what I was doing.
[Commentary: Manual hyperspace plotting. At last, the meatbag is doing something interesting.]
"Time to go then," Vila muttered, acting as the copilot, and while I focused on being the navigator, constantly calibrating our uncharted route, she reached out for the hyperspace lever.
[Warning: Probability of arriving inside a star is—]
"HK." Vila glared at him, "Shut up."
[Revision: Risk is... Acceptable.]
"Punch it," I whispered, my eyes still closed, feeling the changes of the current, and the moment she pushed the lever, we were off. Without hesitation, the stars stretched, bleeding into blue swirls, the ship bucking once before stabilizing inside the current I had chosen. By now, it was as if my hand was holding onto a rope underwater, pulling us towards our ultimate goal, but I had to nudge it sometimes. To avoid the sharp rocks and obstacles in the water, unseen by everyone else.
"Kael… this doesn't feel like a normal jump."
"It isn't," I murmured, focusing on the pulse I was feeling, keeping it steady, "This route doesn't exist. Not on any chart." I muttered, giving micro-changes to the computer, nudging the ship around spaces where I felt... danger.
[Observation: The hyperlane is indeed unstable.]
"HK," Vila hissed, "We know."
[Irritated Update: Still acceptable.]
"We will... get there... sooner than we think..." I muttered, furrowing my brows.
"Kael?" Vila asked, perking up in her seat, "We are supposed to find it only and then wait."
"I know," I answered, but the more I focused on the feeling, the more I... I just don't know if we will have the luxury of time."
"That doesn't sound good." She grunted, pursing her lips.
"No... It indeed doesn't."
...
....
...
The travel through our hyperspace lane didn't really end; instead, it was as if it let go of us, like I was pulling my hand out of the river, because I knew we were there. The moment I did, I also opened my eyes, and the cargoship lurched a little while Vila, without asking, pulled on the lever, bringing us back to normal, making the ship reappear in regular space.
By just the first reading, we were at the edge of a system where we couldn't see any buoys set up for communications or traffic, no probes were coming our way, and there was no comm noise bleeding through the static. It was... empty of civilization.
"By the Force..." Vila swore under her breath.
[Alert: This system is categorized as highly dangerous.]
I didn't answer... I couldn't. Because I was staring straight ahead, just like Vila, I was marveling at what we were seeing.
There were two immediate heavenly bodies present. The first was a star that dominated everything at first glance. It was a blue giant, vast beyond reason, burning with a cold yet furious brilliance. And when I say 'cold,' I mean its color... Luckily, our shields were holding, but radiation poured from it in waves, not exactly something that we should get really close... Or risk it cooking some of the ship systems. Worse than that, there was another reason not to get close to it.
To its side, orbiting not as a companion but as a vicious predator, or torturer, like a Sith, there was a black hole locked in a dance with it. It was small, yes, but only cosmically speaking. We could catch it being there solely because it was eating the companion star, the blue giant's light. It was slurping it up in an actual elongated strand, which was being pulled from it, getting distorted and devoured in slow, inevitable gulps.
"This…" Vila whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the engines, "This is insane. I had never seen a system like this."
[Dry Assessment: Binary system composed of stellar mass imbalance and terminal gravitational decay. Addendum: Living in a volatile system like this is not a wise choice, even for a meatbag.]
"Maybe it is for a Sith..." I muttered, "If they want to meditate on the meaning of such a destruction of... life."
[Statement: The star is not alive.]
"It was a metaphor..." I muttered, while I began scanning, and soon found something.
Orbiting that catastrophic death-duet was a gas giant, in terms of planet sizes, of course. It was immense and striped with violent bands of color, mostly bruised purples, bleeding oranges, with a touch of sickly greens. As we got closer to that spot, we could soon see lightning flickering constantly across its body, some storms larger than planets. It was a gas giant, alright, almost close to being a brown dwarf and making it into a three-star system. But it stopped at the right moment, remaining a planet.
And around that body… There were moons, hundreds of them.
Some had to come from a shattered body of rock, ice, and dead worlds, some torn apart into ring debris, others locked in unstable orbits, pulled this way and that by the gravity of both the gas giant and the feeding black hole beyond it. It was a mess... But amongst those moons, one stood out from the rest.
"Do you feel it?" Vila asked, and I answered quietly.
"I do."
It was an unmistakable feeling of the Dark Side, permeating all around the moon.
[Observation: Ambient energy readings are inconsistent with natural phenomena. The moon had been terraformed and is kept stable via meatbag intervention.]
"I think we found it..." I muttered, trying to get just a bit closer, so we could get a visual.
It wasn't the largest of the moons, and as it rotated, letting the blue giant's light fall onto it, it wasn't the brightest either. But it was the only one with a visible atmosphere, having thin, pale clouds covering dark stone and frosted ground below. It was a cold world... but not that cold to not have oceans on its surface. I could notice jagged mountain chains cut across its land, very quickly identifying one of them as the one in my vision. Yes... The cliffside... The ocean below it... Yes... It was at the right spot...
"That's it," I whispered.
"Damn it... All of it…" Vila murmured to herself, "The entire system feels wrong."
"If Jalo and Iowi are here," I said, looking away from the moon, towards the black hole, "We won't be able to feel them, the Dark Side is too thick to pick them out from its noise. Not to mention, communication won't work reliably thanks to the black hole's proximity."
[Recommendation: We should proceed with extreme caution. Tactical analysis suggests this system was chosen deliberately. Isolation, gravitational instability, and limited escape vectors. A perfect hiding place.]
"Yeah," Vila muttered. "Feels like a trap designed by someone who knows how Jedi think."
"Or other Sith," I leaned back in my seat, breathing slowly, centering myself against the crushing pressure of the Dark Side. "We will wait for Master Katarn and Master Solo." I said after I controlled my emotions, "HK, help me boost our comms. I want to send out a buoy beyond the system's edge so Master Katarn can lock onto it. We will broadcast our location on the frequencies we tend to use." Luckily, he wasn't arguing but already doing it, and I was about to turn towards Vila, when the ship began moving... on its own.
"Kael?!"
"It's not me!" I said, and no matter what I was doing... the ship was flying on its own, heading towards the moon.
[Observation: The navigation systems are locked. We are being dragged in.]
"Don't fight it!" I said, turning serious, "Just keep making that buoy! Send it out and transmit our approach vector through it... If we are being brought in, that means there has to be a stable route and some that are less... savory. Make sure that when Master Katarn arrives, they will know how to get to the Moon. As for us," I looked at Vila, "Let's see what this is about..."