A/N: So it took me a tad too long yesterday to write the chapter. I had done around 2k words but there wasn't an chapter complete worthy part in it, so I delayed it and ended up with an 3k word chapter. Hope you enjoy the chapter, and don't forget to vote!
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I was sitting cross-legged on the navigation console behind the pilots' chairs, my and placed beside me. The air still stank of ozone, blood, and Nari's nervous sweat.
Nari, for his part, was pacing the short length of the cockpit, desperately wiping his hands on his already-filthy robes. He hadn't been able to bring himself to sit in the pilot's chair again, which was probably a smart move for his sanity.
"What in the actual fuck are we still doing here?" he finally burst out, his voice cracking.
I didn't open my eyes.
"It's been an hour!" he half-yelled, gesturing wildly at the viewport showing the curve of Tatooine. "An entire hour! We're just... sitting here! And you... you called them! You called Inquisitorius Headquarters to announce we stole their ship! You're not just insane, you're... you're suicidally insane!"
"Hush, boy," I murmured, my mind deep in the ship's guts. "I am mentally sifting through every single part of this spyware-laden ship so the Empire doesn't catch and hang us bare-ass in the middle of a Coruscant street. And for the record," I cracked one eye open, "everything is just according to keikaku."
"Kei-what-now?!"
"Keikaku," I repeated patiently. "It means 'plan.' Try to keep up."
"Stop fucking with me!" he snapped, his Jedi composure completely gone
"I know it has trackers! What Imperial ship doesn't?! That's why we should be moving, not... not sitting on your ass while they close in!"
He ran a shaky hand through his hair. "We should jump. Now. Ditch this thing with some black market smuggler. I've heard Eriadu has a thriving market. We could be there and back before... before... Their support could be arriving any minute!"
I sighed, opening both eyes. "Have some patience. Aren't you Jedi supposed to be virtues of patience or something?"
"Patience, my ass!" he shot back,"Its for meditation, not when you steal the ship of those who hunt Jedi across galaxy like rabid dogs!"
"Relax your robes. Even if they scrambled a Class 0.75 cruiser the second I hung up—which they wouldn't, because bureaucracy is a bitch—it would still take them three standard days just to get a ship here. We have time."
I closed my eyes again, focusing. "Now, seriously. Shut up. I'm almost..."
While he'd been having his little meltdown, I'd been spreading my Hyper Perception through the Scythe's guts like a ghost. It wasn't one tracker. It was dozens. A beautiful, complex, three-dimensional blueprint had formed in my mind, and inside it was a paranoid mesh of redundant systems, quantum-entangled comms, and decoy nodes. A real work of art. But they all had to report to a central node. The one I'd been hunting... there... buried deep in the main reactor shielding...
"Ah... found it!"
I clapped my gauntleted hands together. The sound was a sharp CLANG that made Nari jump.
"Found what? The 'keikaku'?"
"The central spyware node, of course," I said, hopping down from the console and getting to my feet in a smooth motion.. I felt a little dizzy; holding my perception at that level for an hour was a new record.
"It's a bitch, honestly. Hidden deep inside the main reactor housing, routed through about... twelve... no, thirteen false diagnostic hoops. I nearly lost track of the mental circuit and calculations trying to untangle that data spaghetti. But, got it."
Nari just stared at me. His face was a perfect portrait of 'I have no idea what you just said and I am 90% sure you are a demon.' "Huh? Mental... circuit? Calculations? What in the Force are you talking about?"
"Don't worry your pretty, traumatized head about it," I said, clapping him on the shoulder.
"Just take us down."
He recoiled, staring at the pilot's seat. "Down?! Down where?"
I pointed out the main viewport, at the giant, tan-and-brown orb of Tatooine below us.
"Back to Tatooine," I said, sealing the helmet. "Land this thing somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Jundland Wastes, Dune Sea... I don't care. Just find a patch of sand where no one will bother us for an hour."
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Nari hated this. He hated the heat, he hated the smell, and he was rapidly developing a deep, profound hatred for his co-pilot.
The landing was a controlled crash. The armored maniac—who had, during the descent, casually introduced himself as "Fulcrum"—had Nari bring the Scythe down hard in a desolate canyon deep in the Jundland Wastes. The moment the engines powered down, the silence of the desert rushed in, absolute and suffocating. It was broken only by the ping-ping-ping of cooling metal and Nari's own ragged breathing.
"Alright, stay here, don't touch anything," Fulcrum had said, his voice grating through the helmet vocoder. "And try to clean up. This place smells like a wet wookiee died in a fear-latrine."
And whose fault is that?! Nari wanted to scream. The man in the pilot's seat had... liquefied. The image, the sound, the smell... it was seared into his brain.
He stumbled out of the gore-splattered cockpit, his boots sticking to the deck, and slid to the floor of the main cargo bay. He needed to center himself. He had to.
He closed his eyes, forcing the air into his lungs. Be calm. Be calm.
There is no emotion, there is peace.
The mantra was ash in his mouth. Peace? He was on a stolen In*quisitor shuttle, piloted by a lunatic in armor, after witnessing a man explode into paste. His hands trembled so violently he had to clench them into fists.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
Knowledge? He knew nothing. He was a hunted dog who had just run into... well, he was pretty sure Fulcrum was some new, undiscovered circle of hell. A bounty hunter? A smuggler with a death wish?
CLANG. HSSSSSS. ZRRRRT!
Nari flinched, his eyes snapping open. The sharp, mechanical sounds echoed from one of the small access rooms off the corridor leading to the ramp. The noise was precise, fast, and utterly unnerving.
So much for peace.
He got to his feet, his legs unsteady, and peered around the corner into the open room.
By the Force...
Fulcrum wasn't just "finding a tracker." He was disassembling the damn ship.
Like some kind of demented, high-speed Jawa, he had panels ripped open on the walls and ceiling. A large mat was laid out on the floor, covered in components, tools, and bundles of wires, all arranged with a surgeon's precision.
Where the kriff did he get all that from? The overcoat the guy wore was bulky, but it couldn't have held a full-service toolkit and a roll-out mat.
And the speed. Fulcrum was moving with an impossible, focused energy—pulling a conduit here, soldering a connection there, yanking out entire circuit boards and tossing them contemptuously onto a "junk" pile.
How did he even know what he was doing? This was a high-end, proprietary Imperial ship, not some civilian freighter.
"What in the hells are you...?" Nari started to ask, his voice weak.
Fulcrum didn't even look up from the access panel he was gutting. "I told you. Getting rid of the spyware. All of it. The main node was a bitch to find, but the redundancies are like a nest of loth-rats. You can't just kill one. You have to burn the whole nest."
Nari's brain just... quit.
This was too much. The gore in the cockpit, the insane "Lando" call, and now this high-speed, one-man disassembly crew that had appeared out of nowhere. It was overload. He felt a migraine pounding behind his eyes. He had to get this all out of sight before his mind just packed up and left his body.
He turned, ready to retreat to the cargo bay and maybe find a corner to curl up in. There is no emotion...
He didn't even take a full step before he felt it.
A subtle, quiet shift in the air. A ripple. The unmistakable, subconscious tug of the Force being... used.
His head snapped back so fast his neck cracked.
He stared, his eyes wide, disbelieving.
Fulcrum was still hunched over the wall panel. His right hand was busy soldering a bypass on one board. His left hand was held out, fingers splayed, about a foot from a different, deeper access port buried in the ship's guts.
As Nari watched, the two dozen tiny, deeply-set screws securing the port's cover all started spinning at once.
They zipped out of their sockets in a precise, almost silent cascade, flying through the air to land in a neat little pile on the "junk" mat.
Nari's mouth fell open.
"Aha!" Fulcrum's vocoder crackled, completely oblivious to his audience. He swatted the now-loose cover aside with his gauntlet, plunged his hand into the tangle of pipes and wiring behind it, and ripped out a thick bundle of red cables. "There you are!"
He dug deeper, his armored fingers feeling around, and then pulled out a small, featureless black box with a triumphant grunt.
Nari just stood there, slack-jawed.
He... he'd used the Force.
He'd used the fucking Force.
This unhinged, armored psycho who made a man explode and then joked about it... was Force-sensitive.
Nari's brain, which had been teetering on the edge of a full-blown bluescreen, finally just... tripped and fell.
The categories in his mind were simple: Inquisitors were bad. Jedi were good. And this armor-plated, gore-splattering, ship-stealing lunatic was... was...
The categories were bleeding into each other, and the resulting color was a nauseating shade of 'what the actual fuck'.
"You..." Nari stammered, his voice barely a whisper. His hand, which had been gesturing wildly, just sort of froze in mid-air.
"You're... you're a Jedi?"
Fulcrum, who had been admiring the black box in his hand like he'd just found a winning lottery ticket, went utterly still.
Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head. The single, black T-visor seemed to suck all the light out of the narrow corridor. He hadn't realized Nari was still there.
When he spoke, the casual, smug tone was gone. The vocoder dropped to a flat, chilling monotone.
"Oh, dear."
Nari's blood went cold.
"You saw that, didn't you?" Fulcrum's voice was quiet, almost... disappointed. "I was really hoping to keep that little secret. But now..."
He placed the black box carefully on the toolkit mat.
"...you know."
He stood up, his armored frame filling the small doorway. The air in the ship suddenly felt thick and heavy.
"I'm afraid I have to tie up this loose end," he said, his voice a dead, electronic whisper. "Can't have my secrets getting out."
A jolt of pure, primal terror shot through Nari. *He's going to kill me. He's not a bounty hunter. He's a Dark-sider. A lunatic. He's going to kill me right here.*
Instinct, honed by years of running and a war before that, took over. His hand flew to his waist, fingers wrapping around the smooth, familiar hilt of his lightsaber.
"Stay back!" Nari yelled, his voice cracking. He stumbled backward into the main cargo bay, adopting a shaky, half-assed defensive stance. "I'm warning you!"
Fulcrum just stood there for a second, his helmet tilted, watching him.
Then, the vocoder crackled.
It started as a low *pfft*, then a chuckle, and then it erupted into a full-blown, grating, electronic laugh.
"BWA-HA-HA! OH, *HELLS!*"
The armored maniac was *laughing*. He was bent over, one gauntlet on his knee, his shoulders shaking.
"Oh, by the... by the Force... your *face!*" he wheezed, pointing a gauntleted finger at Nari. "You actually thought I was gonna murder you! That was priceless!"
"Kriff, I wish I had a camera!" he wheezed, the vocoder struggling to process the laughter. "Oh, wait!" He tapped the side of his helmet. "I *do*! This is *definitely* going in the blooper reel! You looked like you were about to shit your robes for the second time today! 'I-I-I warn you!'"
He laughed even harder, turning back to the open panel and snapping conduits back into place with the same impossible, focused efficiency, as if the prank hadn't even broken his stride.
Nari just stood there, hand on his saber, his entire body frozen in a rictus of terror, confusion, and now, dawning, furious humiliation.
A... a prank?
"You..." Nari sputtered, his voice trembling with adrenaline and rage. "You... you asshole!"
Fulcrum finally got his laughter under control, though a few electronic chuckles still escaped the vocoder as he snapped the final access panel shut. He turned back to Nari, who was still standing there, hand on his saber, vibrating with a mixture of leftover terror and fresh, weapons-grade humiliation.
"Alright, alright," Fulcrum said, waving a dismissive gauntlet. "Relax. Don't pop a blood vessel. I'm just messing with you."
He leaned against the bulkhead, crossing his arms. The armored suit clanked. "But to answer your question... a Jedi? Gods, no. Not strictly, per se."
He tapped the side of his helmet, as if in thought. "Let's just say I had an... encounter... with an old master a while back. He taught me a few things about the Force, how to move things, that whole song and dance."
He shrugged, the motion making his shoulder pauldrons shift. "Never really got the chance to join the whole 'Jedi Order' thing before someone decided to light it on fire. To be honest," he added, his voice taking on a thoughtful, almost distant tone, "they probably wouldn't have taken me anyway. I hear I'm not great at following rules."
He clapped his hands together, a sharp, metallic CLANG that signaled the end of the conversation. "Right. That's the last of the trackers. This bird is officially off-grid, scrubbed, and cleaner than a Hutt's conscience... which, okay, isn't saying much, but you get the idea."
He walked past the still-fuming Nari, heading for the gore-splattered cockpit which had been cleaned slighly, ofcourse Nari's courtesy.
"Now, that aside," he called over his shoulder, "let's get you back to your ship before you die of a brain aneurysm. You look like you're one 'boo!' away from a full-on mental collapse."
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After a short, tense flight in the now-ours Scythe, Nari took me to a remote canyon deep in the Jundland Wastes. I had him land the ship a good klick away from his "secret" coordinates.
We had flown above clouds so nobody would notice the ship 'Lando Calrissian' stole coming back to planet. To be honest while the hutts and crimson dawn were intended, I don't even know why exactly I took that guy's name. Maybe cuz it was just the first name that came to my mind.
That guy was probably an smuggler during this time-period, and on the opposite side of galaxy too. So he was kind of already wanted by Empire...Yeah, I was just making reasons to justify and not feel guilt...
Nari, who was still shaking like a dog trying to shit a peach pit, led the way on foot. He was babbling about "geo-cloaking" and "secluded spots," his voice brimming with a pathetic, misplaced hope.
"It's just up here," he said, scrambling over a ridge. "Under this rock formation. Perfectly hidden. They'll never have—"
He rounded the corner and just... stopped.
I came up behind him. "Perfectly hidden, you said?"
In front of us, in a shallow, sandy depression, was what used to be a T-6 shuttle.
Now, it was a modern art installation titled "Tragedy in Durasteel," or maybe "My Ship Got Fucked: A Memoir."
It was sitting on slag blocks, the landing struts completely, utterly gone. The main engine cowlings were torn off, the hyperdrive ripped clean out. Wires dangled from the empty nacelles like the metallic guts of a disemboweled animal.
My god, I thought, my HUD zooming in. It looks like a car left overnight in the bad part of Detroit.
Someone had taken a plasma cutter to the main cockpit viewport, carved a jagged, impatient hole, and just... pulled everything out. The yolk, the nav computer, the dashboard...
They'd even stolen the damn ramp.
I stepped up beside Nari, my helmet's optical sensors cataloging the sheer, unadulterated savagery of the scene. They hadn't just stripped it for parts. They'd looted it. Like vikings.
Nari wasn't moving. He was just standing there, vibrating.
I leaned over, my vocoder making my voice sound entirely too casual for the moment.
"Well, Nari," I said, "it looks like your ship got violated. Violated hard."
Nari just made a small, high-pitched eeeeeeeek sound. It was the noise a mouse makes when it sees the quarterly report on snake-related deaths.
"Jesus," I muttered, walking a slow circle around the husk. My boots crunched on shattered transparisteel. "They didn't even leave the seats. Who steals the seats? That's just disrespectful."
Seriously, what's the black market value on a slightly-used, Jedi-ass-grooved pilot's chair? Ten credits? Maybe they just needed new chairs for the yurt?
Nari finally found his voice, which was mostly just air. "It's... gone. It's all... it was... my credits... my... everything..." He stumbled forward and put a hand on the scarred fuselage, as if checking to see if it was real.
He staggered to the cargo hold, which was now just an empty, echoing box.
"They... they even took my food!" Nari wailed, his voice finally cracking.
Okay, now it's personal, I thought. You can steal a man's hyperdrive, you can steal his seats, but you do not steal his rations. That's just plain evil.
While Nari was auditioning for the local 'Man Has Lost Everything' theater troupe, I decided to do some actual detective work. He was pacing, hyperventilating, and generally being a useless sack of Jedi robes. I tuned him out and scanned the ground.
My HUD highlighted them immediately. Footprints. Lots of them.
They were small, and the tracks were... blurred. Wrapped in cloth.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Tuskens. Sand People. Of course.
That explained the sheer, indiscriminate savagery of the looting. They didn't strip for high-value parts; they stripped for everything. They probably think the cockpit chairs are sacred thrones now.
And then I saw the other thing.
Near the busted-open cockpit, my sensors picked up a dark, spattered stain on the sand.
That's not oil.
I knelt, my glove hovering over it. A quick chemical scan confirmed. Yep. Blood. Not a lot, but enough. A few dark red splashes, already drying in the twin suns.
Somebody put up a fight.
...Or somebody was maybe already here when the Tuskens showed up.
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A/N: Next chapter more blood is going to flow teehee.
Also, next chapter isn't of this story!
Its the first chapter of my OG novel after this chapter, just for feedback. Do tell me your thoughts about it.
Also, an slight request from readers. I have uploaded [Star Wars Rebels: A Gray Tale] on RoyalRoad. If you have time, could you please go there and review the fic, do a few comments etc? It would be much appreciated!
Also the version of fic there is a slightly rewritten one as my writing style changed slightly from start.
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