Re: A Prelude to War (ST/SW) (Ch.10 up)
Posted: 2011-07-17 01:36am
CHAPTER TEN
Cathi slumped back into the pilot's seat with exhaustion. Alarm lights still flashed across the control panel, even though it had been several days since her ship had been so rudely thrown from hyperspace. If she had felt depressed before when she had lost her cargo, now she was desperate. For what must have been the hundredth time, she checked the navicomputer and was rewarded by the same error message she had seen each time before: No Known Objects Found. Unable to triangulate location. What the kriff was that supposed to mean? Tarv had paid a relative fortune for the military-grade navicomputer, which was supposed to be able to function even in the outer reaches of Wild Space. Yet here it was, spitting out errors as if it was a relic of the ancient Hyperspace Wars.
After holding her head in her hands for an indeterminate amount of time, she looked through the forward viewports at the strange system they were in. At the center of the system, where one might expect to find a star, there was a black hole. Orbiting it were charred, dry hulks that might once have been planets, but had been stripped completely bare by the massive supernova that had occurred so long ago.
She tapped the sensor panel again, hoping that it had turned up some more information about the system in the twelve hours since she had last checked. One result stood out, and she called up the details only to frown a moment later. "That can't be right," she finally muttered.
Moving back to the navicomputer, she worked the controls to plot a jump to the other side of the system. Then she pulled back on the hyperdrive levers, and was rewarded as the ship smoothly slipped into hyperspace for the brief moment it would take to cross the system. When she emerged, there was a slight glimmer of reflected light in the dark patch of empty space ahead, and with some careful piloting it grew into a roughly cylindrical, red-striped shape in the near distance.
"Ah!" Orb exclaimed from the co-pilot's seat beside her, despite her not having invited him into the cockpit. "That's a Republic navigation beacon! I haven't seen one in many years..."
Cathi turned to regard the droid with an exasperated expression plastered across her face. "How could you possibly know that?"
"It's written on the beacon," Orb said as he lifted an arm stiffly. Had the droid been capable of humanoid facial expressions, it probably would have worn a look that said 'You idiot'. Despite that particular limitation, Orb's inflections in Basic were quite expressive and carried essentially the same message.
Indeed, in large, blocky plain Basic the beacon read "REPUBLIC PROPERTY" and what was probably once a warning against tampering with or damaging it per some obscure section of the penal code.
"Right," she muttered, turning back to Orb. "Well, since you're such a genius, I trust you can figure out how to retrieve the coordinates from it?"
"Already done, ma'am. There is also a priority message on the beacon. Would you like me to downlink it as well?"
"Yes, and put it on the holo," Cathi answered.
Moments later, a bearded, long-haired figure appeared on the holodisplay in front of her. He wore a flowing robe and the lines in his face probably placed him at about fifty or sixty years old.
"I am Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth aboard the Outbound Flight. If you are receiving this message, then you have traveled through a hyperspace anomaly into a galaxy eighty-five million light-years distant from our own. You should already be familiar with navigating the anomaly, so I will not waste time discussing that. We have entered a sixty-year hibernation while the ship replenishes its hypermatter supplies. Based on the present time, we are approaching the fourth planet of a nearby system."
The message fritzed slightly, and then C'baoth re-appeared. "This is an update to our previous message. We were discovered by a local spacefaring civilization known as the Federation and have agreed to take one of their starships back to their territory. The coordinates on this beacon have been updated to reflect this change."
Cathi leaned back in the pilot's chair and frowned. Talk about a name from the past. The Outbound Flight was one of the many ghost ships that had entered the legends of spacers. Something about a grand exploration mission, lost just before the Clone Wars broke out. But C'baoth? She'd heard that name too during a stop on Ord Mantell. Didn't he have something to do with Thrawn?
She loaded the coordinates into the navicomputer and pulled up a holomap. The region that was highlighted was located off in the middle of the galactic disk, which she found surprising. It was fairly common knowledge that life had developed in the core... then again, this wasn't the same galaxy she knew, at least if the message was to be believed. What sort of hyperspace anomaly was he talking about, anyway? At least the message had provided her with the answer to why she had been dumped from hyperspace.
Several minutes of contemplation later, the connection hit.
C'baoth.
Thrawn.
The Imperial Commodore who had captured her also had blue skin, like Thrawn. He must have been connected to the Grand Admiral, she finally decided. Had they sabotaged her ship to send it here? Then the rational part of her brain caught up with the irrational part and metaphorically slapped it silly. It was just as likely that it was just a bizarre coincidence that she ran into a non-human Imperial Commodore, made a blind, suicidal (by anybody's book) jump into hyperspace, and then ran into a message beacon that purported to come from the long-lost Outbound Flight.
The odds were still unbelievably high for such a coincidence.
Cathi massaged her temples as her brain continued to argue with itself, deciding after some time that none of it made any sense. The only constant that she absolutely knew was that she was lost somewhere in the universe that was most definitely not her own galaxy, and she had coordinates to a region of the galaxy that may or may not have been the final destination of the Outbound Flight.
Well, first things first. Now that she had downloaded the message, she knew where Outbound Flight was -- and that information alone would fetch quite a price on the open market. Assuming she could get back, of course... but like most smugglers, questions like that typically didn't bother her. In the meantime, she had to make sure that nobody else would get the message.
Cathi reached down to the panel and activated the forward laser cannons, then locked them on to the message beacon. One quick tap of the trigger, a single burst of laserfire was all it took to turn the beacon into a glowing cloud of plasma.
With that out of the way, she began to consider her next steps. If she recalled correctly, Outbound Flight was a large and heavily armed vessel, so she would have to be careful not to get too close. Further, the message had not provided her with an actual system, only a region of space that was known as the 'Federation', whatever that meant. And that meant that she would have to go from system to system once in that area to find Outbound Flight.
She also knew that in another couple of weeks, she would get unbearably sick and tired of eating surplus ration packs. As appetizing as the names printed on the standard-issue survival packs sounded, the food inside them contained no resemblance to what the real meal would have been even in the most average of cafeterias. Gray was probably the best word to describe it, closely followed by bland. Delicious was a word that, upon seeing the rations, had fled at speeds faster than the fastest HoloNet message to unknown parts of the universe.
With that in mind, she got up and walked back to what passed for the living quarters in the ridiculously cramped YT-2400 freighter. The one working amenity it did have was a drink processor, and she programmed it for the strongest cup of caf it would produce, knowing full well that she'd probably regret it afterward. Right now, however, she just needed the boost in concentration it would bring.
Minutes later, a cup of steaming caf in hand, she returned to the cockpit and began considering the coordinates on the beacon. While it supposedly provided her with a destination, it also unhelpfully left out the means to get there. She remembered the introductory hyperspace navigation course she'd been required to take during the two years she had attempted to attend a university. While it had glossed over many of the details, it had laid a few facts out. One was that if one was ever lost and without communications, it was prudent to seek out a point in deep space away from stars and other navigational hazards to make it easier to jump to a likely destination.
She ran through the navicomp's display, and programmed it to seek a path to a point several light-years outside the strange system. From there, she could leapfrog through empty space until she was outside the bulk of the galactic disk.
The only issue with this plan, which they had mentioned in the course, was that the safest course was also by far the longest. They had then stressed that millions of ships had been lost over the ages by navigators who tried to take shortcuts when they really should have known better.
On the positive side, once she was in the galactic halo, the stars were dispersed enough that it would only take one or two hyperspace jumps to bring her back to the galactic disk near her destination. From there, it would be a matter of hopping through deep space until she felt comfortable jumping into a star system.
The navicomp beeped its readiness, and she activated the controls. The first jump lasted only a few minutes, enough to send her ship into the middle of a relatively empty patch of space. She took a sip of the now slightly cooled caf and resigned herself to the long, thankless task ahead.
. . .
So this is Helska, Jacen reflected from his upside-down position in the ventral gun turret as the Rock Dragon dropped out of hyperspace along with the Avengers. It had seven planets in all, including a couple of gas giants in the outer system. Looks like any other system.
He found himself somewhat dizzied by all the movement; so as to hopefully avoid detection, all of Kyp's squadron was looping and rolling as they moved, seemingly on the edge of disaster but in reality highly coordinated. He whistled softly. They were good pilots.
"We've got a lot of activity around the fourth planet," Jaina called from the cockpit.
Tenel Ka broke into the comm. "I thought it was supposed to be uninhabited?"
"It's not now."
"Any hostiles?" Kyp asked when there was a lull in chatter. Jacen had almost forgotten that the Rock Dragon had the best sensor kit of any of the ships flying with Kyp...
"I'm reading what looks like an asteroid field in orbit around the fourth planet," Jaina replied, "along with a large moon. All have lifesigns."
"Don't tell me we came all the way out here to find a mining operation," Miko said, his voice dripping with so much sarcasm that Jacen imagined he could catch the excess in a bucket.
"Cut the chatter," Kyp called. "We've got incomings. Rock Dragon, do you have readings on them? Identification?"
"Negative," Jaina replied. "Bunch of asteroids, came from the fifth planet."
"Let me get this straight, a bunch of asteroids just broke orbit and decided to come over here?"
"I said cut the chatter, Miko."
There was an audible sigh. "Roger that."
"Rock Dragon," Kyp continued, "do you have any sign of the scientists yet?"
"Negative." There was a pause. "Those asteroids are... accelerating?"
"Then they aren't asteroids," Kyp replied. "Shields up, weapons ready. Mark them as potentially hostile and scan all frequencies for comm traffic."
Suddenly, Jacen's targeting screen was awash with yellow dots. "Blaster bolts," he muttered to himself. There must be around a hundred of them.
"No comm traffic," Jaina reported. "They seem to be well-coordinated."
"Strange," Kyp remarked. "Hang on, we've got something inbound."
"Rocks."
"What?"
They're firing rocks at us? Jacen wondered.
"Slight correction," Jaina dryly said, "they're molten rocks. Re-designating incoming group as hostile."
There was a snort. "Rocks? What are they going to do next, start throwing sticks at us?"
"Miko," Kyp warned, obviously getting annoyed at his wingmate. "Avengers, break formation on my mark." He waited until the two sides had almost closed to visual range. "Mark."
Shortly after the squadron split into pairs, they found themselves in the middle of what would best be described as a swarm. Jacen opened fire along with everyone else, and space was suddenly awash with the streaks of tracers and the strange molten missiles of the enemy.
He paused for a moment, in between bursts, to take a look at one of the enemy ships that was flying low below him, and noticed its roughly aerodynamic shape, transparent canopy, and even stranger-looking pilot. So they're starfighters, he thought before nailing the fighter with a burst from his twin laser cannons.
The first shot... vanished? he wondered, but the second powerful shot caught the fighter squarely in the center and blew it into a cloud of molten debris. As he looked around, he noticed that the rest of the Avengers were faring just as well against these crazy fighters.
"Jacen, stay sharp," Tenel Ka pointed out from the other turret. Jolted, he noticed a few of the fighters had strayed close to his position, so he resumed firing. The first blew up immediately, but he found that he had to put several bursts into the second before it was also destroyed.
"They seem to be diverting our fire," he finally remarked. "And they're getting better at it."
"Won't help them," Miko replied in a smug voice. "Those rocks of theirs are a joke."
"Hey, Tenel Ka... I keep getting grav-well alarms," Jaina reported from the cockpit on the ship's intercom a few moments later. "Is there anything wrong with the instruments?"
"No, I just had them checked out," Tenel Ka replied.
Jacen, meanwhile, squeezed his triggers to send another burst of rapid blasterfire toward one of the dagger-like fighters. This time, instead of disappearing or impacting, he watched in astonishment as the shots quite literally bent around the fighter, sailing off into the distance.
"Um... Jaina?" he tapped his headset. "I don't know what's going on here, but my shots just... well... bent."
"I'm seeing the same thing happening," Tenel Ka remarked a moment later.
"What do you mean, bent?" Jaina asked.
Jacen tried to nail another fighter but it spun out of his line of fire. "I'm not really sure. It's like the wind blowing the water from a fountain: it just sort of starts curving sideways."
Jaina was completely silent for a long enough time that he tapped his headset again. "Jaina?"
"Gravity," she replied an instant later. "It has to be."
"What has to be?"
There was an audible sigh over the intercom. "Think about it, Jacen. What's so dangerous about a black hole?"
The question distracted him enough that he only clipped one of the fighters instead of nailing it head-on. "I don't know," he said in an annoyed voice after the fighter went out of his arc. "It'll suck you in if you get too close?"
"That's part of it," Jaina replied. "The gravity is so strong even light can't escape. You know how even stars bend light around themselves? It sounds like these fighters are doing the same thing, but on a much smaller scale..."
"What stops them from getting crushed to death, then?" Jacen pointedly asked.
"How should I know? Probably their own equivalent of inertial compensators."
A war whoop from Miko dragged Jacen's attention back to the battle. "That was the last of them," Kyp confirmed. "Now let's go see if we can find that ExGal shuttle."
They drove on through the system, passing the fifth planet several hours later. The planet glowed dimly blue-green with reflected light from the primary star. Like most gas giants, it was a ball of clouds that looked incredibly calm from a distance. Having been deep inside Yavin's atmosphere, Jacen knew that it should be anything but calm.
Far ahead in the distance, he could just barely see the speck of light that was supposed to be the fourth planet. As they drew closer, it became larger and larger until they could see that it was frozen solid, with one oddly-shaped moon orbiting.
"Some pretty strange readings coming off that planet," Jaina remarked from the cockpit.
"So I noticed," Kyp replied over the comm. "Looks like some sort of jamming. I should have figured they'd be expecting us."
Jacen knew that his sister was shaking her head. "It couldn't be jamming--it's on all the wrong frequencies. Wouldn't mess up anything except maybe old radionics gear. I really don't know what to make of it."
"Well, for all we know, they're just as confused about us as we are about them. Maybe they're expecting us to be using those frequencies to communicate."
"Could be. Avengers, hold course. Jaina, are you picking up anything that looks like the ExGal shuttle yet?"
"Not yet," she replied before cutting herself off. "Wait. I think I've got an ion drive trail... it's pretty diffuse, could be anywhere up to a week old."
"That matches the distress call," Kyp remarked. "Where did they go?"
"Looks like they went somewhere toward the northern hemisphere, but the trail just cuts out halfway to that moon... I'd say they were intercepted, but there's no debris anywhere. They might still be alive."
"What, on the moon?"
"Maybe."
The comm went silent for a moment, and Jacen squinted to get a better look at the planet and its moon. Now that they were closer, he noticed that it wasn't as round as one might expect a moon to be -- more disk-shaped and kind of rough looking. Around its equator, he could just barely make out what appeared to be sharply curved peaks. It was a little bit on the small side, too, now that he thought about it. A captured asteroid? he wondered.
"Miko, on my signal, you and I break and make a pass at the moon. Avengers, you are to hold back and escort the Rock Dragon until we regroup."
There was a flurry of acknowledgements and then the two X-wings separated from the rest of the squadron. Not long after that, Jaina opened the channel again.
"Kyp, Miko, you have bogeys inbound. I think that moon's their base."
"We see them," Kyp replied. "Looks like more of those rock fighters. I think we can handle it. Stay sharp."
"Copy that," Jaina replied. "Jacen, Tenel Ka, you ready?"
"Ready as ever," Jacen said.
"I am ready," Tenel Ka added.
Jaina chirped the comm. "Range in thirty seconds. Um... Kyp, heads up. Two more groups of fighters are closing in on you."
"Copy," Kyp replied tersely. "Miko, break right! Go close to the moon, let's see if we can lose them."
A moment later, the Rock Dragon entered the thick of the fray. This time, Jacen guessed that there were at least twice as many fighters as the last time. Not that it mattered much -- the molten missiles of the enemy didn't even pose much threat to the two old Z-95 Headhunters in the Avengers.
"What the kriff?" one of the pilots, who flew a B-wing if he remembered right, exclaimed. "My shields just went down!"
"I'll get 'em off your tail, Alesatt," his wingman replied. "Hang in there!"
"Mine are down too!" another pilot exclaimed. "Damn it--" then the transmission cut off in a burst of static.
"Avenger Six, do you copy?" Jaina asked. "Avenger Six! Kriff. Avenger Seven, did you see what happened?"
"Came right out of nowhere," Avenger Seven replied. "Shot cooked off his magazine."
"Avenger Eleven, what's your status?"
The B-wing pilot coughed. "I'm a little roughed up, but my shields are back."
"What happened?"
"I don't know," the pilot replied. "Arfour was babbling something about gravity and magnetic fields, then my shields went down until my wingmate blew the fighter off my tail."
As Jacen fired another burst at a passing rock-fighter, there was a scream over the comm and he saw the icon representing Avenger Nine wink out.
"Kyp, what's going on? We're under heavy fire!" Jaina exclaimed.
"Not much better," Kyp replied. "We can't shake them!"
"Maybe we should just get out of here. I think we can still outrun them," Jaina suggested.
"Agreed," Kyp replied. "Avengers, meet up at the rendezvous point. We'll be right behind you."
The Rock Dragon went into a tight turn that sent Jacen's fire wide, and he heard the sharp whine of the engines running up to full thrust.
"No shield!" Miko suddenly exclaimed. "Tractor beam!"
Jacen frowned. It was nearly impossible to snag a fighter with a tractor beam at the near-relativistic speeds they usually traveled at. Then again, they obviously weren't dealing with an enemy familiar with the term 'impossible'. Who'd ever heard of stripping fully charged shields away, anyway?
"Hang on!" Kyp answered. "Where's it coming from?"
"I can't tell!" Miko shouted. "I'm at full power but I'm still going backwards!"
Two of the symbols that represented Avengers Three and Four--a Z-95 and an X-TIE Ugly, respectively--broke from the formation and curved back toward where Kyp and Miko were.
"We're coming!" Avenger Three said.
"Negative, Negative!" Kyp shouted. "Get out of here, there are too many of them!"
"We're not leaving you," Three replied.
Kyp nearly screamed. "You kriffing idiots! Get the kriff out of here!"
There was another burst of static and Avenger Four's icon winked out.
"I see you! Hang on!"
"Avenger Three, return to formation! You have a wing of bogeys on your tail!" Jaina shouted.
"I'll make it!"
"The hell you will!" Kyp exclaimed.
"I'm hit!" Miko reported. "Port engines out! I'm losing fuel!"
"Can you eject?"
There was a brief pause, followed by a spurt of very descriptive cursing. "My hatch is jammed!"
"I'll try to break their lock," Kyp said. "Hang on! Three, this is no time for heroics. Get out of here before you get yourself killed!"
"I've got your six," Three replied.
"Damn it, Three," Kyp grumbled. "If you insist. I'm going in. Cover me."
"The hell is that?" Jaina said on the internal comm. A new symbol winked to life on Jacen's targeting screen and he squinted to see where it was in the distance. Whatever it was, it seemed to be much larger than the rocky fighters they'd been struggling with. Roughly ovoid-shaped, it came toward them slowly--and then the front of it seemed to disintegrate into a cloud of pieces.
"Wasn't me," Jacen remarked.
"Oh kriff," Jaina said. "Missiles." A cloud of red blips flashed to life on the targeting scope, suddenly seeming to streak forward toward the remnants of the Avengers.
"Miko, did it work?" Kyp asked.
"Negative," came Miko's subdued reply. "Get out of here--how's the Navy going to know what's happening out here if nobody survives to tell? I'll be fine without you guys."
"You're kidding," Kyp replied. "I'm not going to let them kill or capture you if I can help it."
"I am a Jedi," Miko intoned, "and the Force is my ally..."
Avenger Three burst into a fireball right behind Kyp. The sudden impact seemed to make up the older Jedi's mind. "We'll be back, Miko, I promise. May the Force be with you. Jaina, what's the status?"
"We can't jump yet, there are too many gravity wells."
Jacen saw one of the missiles flash by, and for a fleeting second he thought he saw wings and a tail. He tried to track another missile but it passed too fast to hit. Then he felt a thump and looked around to see where it came from. His mouth dropped as the... thing... came into sight. It wasn't even a missile at all, but a living creature. It crawled over the hull of the Rock Dragon with four stubby appendages. Vicious-looking pincers formed its mouth, and for a brief moment the creature looked at him with a beady eye.
It reminded him of a sea creature he had seen in an aquarium on one of the worlds he'd visited with his parents as a young child.
Then he snapped out of the moment and swung his turret around as fast as he could, hoping it would depress far enough to let him hit the ugly thing. At its lowest point, he fired. The first two bolts passed right over the creature, and then the lower pair of cannons spat out red bolts that blew the thing completely off the hull. His proximity alarms blared from the close hit before fading away.
"Jaina, they're firing mynocks, or some ugly relative of theirs! If we don't jump to hyperspace right now, one might chew through something important!"
"I'm trying!" she cried in desperation. "The damn thing's going crazy with all the gravity wells!"
Another of the things passed uncomfortably close and Jacen grabbed the comm again. "Just jump anywhere, damn it!"
"It got my droid!" one of the Avengers exclaimed.
Jacen saw another creature heading straight at him and blew it away with a burst of laser fire. "I don't think we have any more time!"
"Hang on!" Jaina shouted triumphantly, and the stars seemed to elongate for a brief, frozen moment of time before settling into the familiar, swirling maelstrom of hyperspace.
Cathi slumped back into the pilot's seat with exhaustion. Alarm lights still flashed across the control panel, even though it had been several days since her ship had been so rudely thrown from hyperspace. If she had felt depressed before when she had lost her cargo, now she was desperate. For what must have been the hundredth time, she checked the navicomputer and was rewarded by the same error message she had seen each time before: No Known Objects Found. Unable to triangulate location. What the kriff was that supposed to mean? Tarv had paid a relative fortune for the military-grade navicomputer, which was supposed to be able to function even in the outer reaches of Wild Space. Yet here it was, spitting out errors as if it was a relic of the ancient Hyperspace Wars.
After holding her head in her hands for an indeterminate amount of time, she looked through the forward viewports at the strange system they were in. At the center of the system, where one might expect to find a star, there was a black hole. Orbiting it were charred, dry hulks that might once have been planets, but had been stripped completely bare by the massive supernova that had occurred so long ago.
She tapped the sensor panel again, hoping that it had turned up some more information about the system in the twelve hours since she had last checked. One result stood out, and she called up the details only to frown a moment later. "That can't be right," she finally muttered.
Moving back to the navicomputer, she worked the controls to plot a jump to the other side of the system. Then she pulled back on the hyperdrive levers, and was rewarded as the ship smoothly slipped into hyperspace for the brief moment it would take to cross the system. When she emerged, there was a slight glimmer of reflected light in the dark patch of empty space ahead, and with some careful piloting it grew into a roughly cylindrical, red-striped shape in the near distance.
"Ah!" Orb exclaimed from the co-pilot's seat beside her, despite her not having invited him into the cockpit. "That's a Republic navigation beacon! I haven't seen one in many years..."
Cathi turned to regard the droid with an exasperated expression plastered across her face. "How could you possibly know that?"
"It's written on the beacon," Orb said as he lifted an arm stiffly. Had the droid been capable of humanoid facial expressions, it probably would have worn a look that said 'You idiot'. Despite that particular limitation, Orb's inflections in Basic were quite expressive and carried essentially the same message.
Indeed, in large, blocky plain Basic the beacon read "REPUBLIC PROPERTY" and what was probably once a warning against tampering with or damaging it per some obscure section of the penal code.
"Right," she muttered, turning back to Orb. "Well, since you're such a genius, I trust you can figure out how to retrieve the coordinates from it?"
"Already done, ma'am. There is also a priority message on the beacon. Would you like me to downlink it as well?"
"Yes, and put it on the holo," Cathi answered.
Moments later, a bearded, long-haired figure appeared on the holodisplay in front of her. He wore a flowing robe and the lines in his face probably placed him at about fifty or sixty years old.
"I am Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth aboard the Outbound Flight. If you are receiving this message, then you have traveled through a hyperspace anomaly into a galaxy eighty-five million light-years distant from our own. You should already be familiar with navigating the anomaly, so I will not waste time discussing that. We have entered a sixty-year hibernation while the ship replenishes its hypermatter supplies. Based on the present time, we are approaching the fourth planet of a nearby system."
The message fritzed slightly, and then C'baoth re-appeared. "This is an update to our previous message. We were discovered by a local spacefaring civilization known as the Federation and have agreed to take one of their starships back to their territory. The coordinates on this beacon have been updated to reflect this change."
Cathi leaned back in the pilot's chair and frowned. Talk about a name from the past. The Outbound Flight was one of the many ghost ships that had entered the legends of spacers. Something about a grand exploration mission, lost just before the Clone Wars broke out. But C'baoth? She'd heard that name too during a stop on Ord Mantell. Didn't he have something to do with Thrawn?
She loaded the coordinates into the navicomputer and pulled up a holomap. The region that was highlighted was located off in the middle of the galactic disk, which she found surprising. It was fairly common knowledge that life had developed in the core... then again, this wasn't the same galaxy she knew, at least if the message was to be believed. What sort of hyperspace anomaly was he talking about, anyway? At least the message had provided her with the answer to why she had been dumped from hyperspace.
Several minutes of contemplation later, the connection hit.
C'baoth.
Thrawn.
The Imperial Commodore who had captured her also had blue skin, like Thrawn. He must have been connected to the Grand Admiral, she finally decided. Had they sabotaged her ship to send it here? Then the rational part of her brain caught up with the irrational part and metaphorically slapped it silly. It was just as likely that it was just a bizarre coincidence that she ran into a non-human Imperial Commodore, made a blind, suicidal (by anybody's book) jump into hyperspace, and then ran into a message beacon that purported to come from the long-lost Outbound Flight.
The odds were still unbelievably high for such a coincidence.
Cathi massaged her temples as her brain continued to argue with itself, deciding after some time that none of it made any sense. The only constant that she absolutely knew was that she was lost somewhere in the universe that was most definitely not her own galaxy, and she had coordinates to a region of the galaxy that may or may not have been the final destination of the Outbound Flight.
Well, first things first. Now that she had downloaded the message, she knew where Outbound Flight was -- and that information alone would fetch quite a price on the open market. Assuming she could get back, of course... but like most smugglers, questions like that typically didn't bother her. In the meantime, she had to make sure that nobody else would get the message.
Cathi reached down to the panel and activated the forward laser cannons, then locked them on to the message beacon. One quick tap of the trigger, a single burst of laserfire was all it took to turn the beacon into a glowing cloud of plasma.
With that out of the way, she began to consider her next steps. If she recalled correctly, Outbound Flight was a large and heavily armed vessel, so she would have to be careful not to get too close. Further, the message had not provided her with an actual system, only a region of space that was known as the 'Federation', whatever that meant. And that meant that she would have to go from system to system once in that area to find Outbound Flight.
She also knew that in another couple of weeks, she would get unbearably sick and tired of eating surplus ration packs. As appetizing as the names printed on the standard-issue survival packs sounded, the food inside them contained no resemblance to what the real meal would have been even in the most average of cafeterias. Gray was probably the best word to describe it, closely followed by bland. Delicious was a word that, upon seeing the rations, had fled at speeds faster than the fastest HoloNet message to unknown parts of the universe.
With that in mind, she got up and walked back to what passed for the living quarters in the ridiculously cramped YT-2400 freighter. The one working amenity it did have was a drink processor, and she programmed it for the strongest cup of caf it would produce, knowing full well that she'd probably regret it afterward. Right now, however, she just needed the boost in concentration it would bring.
Minutes later, a cup of steaming caf in hand, she returned to the cockpit and began considering the coordinates on the beacon. While it supposedly provided her with a destination, it also unhelpfully left out the means to get there. She remembered the introductory hyperspace navigation course she'd been required to take during the two years she had attempted to attend a university. While it had glossed over many of the details, it had laid a few facts out. One was that if one was ever lost and without communications, it was prudent to seek out a point in deep space away from stars and other navigational hazards to make it easier to jump to a likely destination.
She ran through the navicomp's display, and programmed it to seek a path to a point several light-years outside the strange system. From there, she could leapfrog through empty space until she was outside the bulk of the galactic disk.
The only issue with this plan, which they had mentioned in the course, was that the safest course was also by far the longest. They had then stressed that millions of ships had been lost over the ages by navigators who tried to take shortcuts when they really should have known better.
On the positive side, once she was in the galactic halo, the stars were dispersed enough that it would only take one or two hyperspace jumps to bring her back to the galactic disk near her destination. From there, it would be a matter of hopping through deep space until she felt comfortable jumping into a star system.
The navicomp beeped its readiness, and she activated the controls. The first jump lasted only a few minutes, enough to send her ship into the middle of a relatively empty patch of space. She took a sip of the now slightly cooled caf and resigned herself to the long, thankless task ahead.
. . .
So this is Helska, Jacen reflected from his upside-down position in the ventral gun turret as the Rock Dragon dropped out of hyperspace along with the Avengers. It had seven planets in all, including a couple of gas giants in the outer system. Looks like any other system.
He found himself somewhat dizzied by all the movement; so as to hopefully avoid detection, all of Kyp's squadron was looping and rolling as they moved, seemingly on the edge of disaster but in reality highly coordinated. He whistled softly. They were good pilots.
"We've got a lot of activity around the fourth planet," Jaina called from the cockpit.
Tenel Ka broke into the comm. "I thought it was supposed to be uninhabited?"
"It's not now."
"Any hostiles?" Kyp asked when there was a lull in chatter. Jacen had almost forgotten that the Rock Dragon had the best sensor kit of any of the ships flying with Kyp...
"I'm reading what looks like an asteroid field in orbit around the fourth planet," Jaina replied, "along with a large moon. All have lifesigns."
"Don't tell me we came all the way out here to find a mining operation," Miko said, his voice dripping with so much sarcasm that Jacen imagined he could catch the excess in a bucket.
"Cut the chatter," Kyp called. "We've got incomings. Rock Dragon, do you have readings on them? Identification?"
"Negative," Jaina replied. "Bunch of asteroids, came from the fifth planet."
"Let me get this straight, a bunch of asteroids just broke orbit and decided to come over here?"
"I said cut the chatter, Miko."
There was an audible sigh. "Roger that."
"Rock Dragon," Kyp continued, "do you have any sign of the scientists yet?"
"Negative." There was a pause. "Those asteroids are... accelerating?"
"Then they aren't asteroids," Kyp replied. "Shields up, weapons ready. Mark them as potentially hostile and scan all frequencies for comm traffic."
Suddenly, Jacen's targeting screen was awash with yellow dots. "Blaster bolts," he muttered to himself. There must be around a hundred of them.
"No comm traffic," Jaina reported. "They seem to be well-coordinated."
"Strange," Kyp remarked. "Hang on, we've got something inbound."
"Rocks."
"What?"
They're firing rocks at us? Jacen wondered.
"Slight correction," Jaina dryly said, "they're molten rocks. Re-designating incoming group as hostile."
There was a snort. "Rocks? What are they going to do next, start throwing sticks at us?"
"Miko," Kyp warned, obviously getting annoyed at his wingmate. "Avengers, break formation on my mark." He waited until the two sides had almost closed to visual range. "Mark."
Shortly after the squadron split into pairs, they found themselves in the middle of what would best be described as a swarm. Jacen opened fire along with everyone else, and space was suddenly awash with the streaks of tracers and the strange molten missiles of the enemy.
He paused for a moment, in between bursts, to take a look at one of the enemy ships that was flying low below him, and noticed its roughly aerodynamic shape, transparent canopy, and even stranger-looking pilot. So they're starfighters, he thought before nailing the fighter with a burst from his twin laser cannons.
The first shot... vanished? he wondered, but the second powerful shot caught the fighter squarely in the center and blew it into a cloud of molten debris. As he looked around, he noticed that the rest of the Avengers were faring just as well against these crazy fighters.
"Jacen, stay sharp," Tenel Ka pointed out from the other turret. Jolted, he noticed a few of the fighters had strayed close to his position, so he resumed firing. The first blew up immediately, but he found that he had to put several bursts into the second before it was also destroyed.
"They seem to be diverting our fire," he finally remarked. "And they're getting better at it."
"Won't help them," Miko replied in a smug voice. "Those rocks of theirs are a joke."
"Hey, Tenel Ka... I keep getting grav-well alarms," Jaina reported from the cockpit on the ship's intercom a few moments later. "Is there anything wrong with the instruments?"
"No, I just had them checked out," Tenel Ka replied.
Jacen, meanwhile, squeezed his triggers to send another burst of rapid blasterfire toward one of the dagger-like fighters. This time, instead of disappearing or impacting, he watched in astonishment as the shots quite literally bent around the fighter, sailing off into the distance.
"Um... Jaina?" he tapped his headset. "I don't know what's going on here, but my shots just... well... bent."
"I'm seeing the same thing happening," Tenel Ka remarked a moment later.
"What do you mean, bent?" Jaina asked.
Jacen tried to nail another fighter but it spun out of his line of fire. "I'm not really sure. It's like the wind blowing the water from a fountain: it just sort of starts curving sideways."
Jaina was completely silent for a long enough time that he tapped his headset again. "Jaina?"
"Gravity," she replied an instant later. "It has to be."
"What has to be?"
There was an audible sigh over the intercom. "Think about it, Jacen. What's so dangerous about a black hole?"
The question distracted him enough that he only clipped one of the fighters instead of nailing it head-on. "I don't know," he said in an annoyed voice after the fighter went out of his arc. "It'll suck you in if you get too close?"
"That's part of it," Jaina replied. "The gravity is so strong even light can't escape. You know how even stars bend light around themselves? It sounds like these fighters are doing the same thing, but on a much smaller scale..."
"What stops them from getting crushed to death, then?" Jacen pointedly asked.
"How should I know? Probably their own equivalent of inertial compensators."
A war whoop from Miko dragged Jacen's attention back to the battle. "That was the last of them," Kyp confirmed. "Now let's go see if we can find that ExGal shuttle."
They drove on through the system, passing the fifth planet several hours later. The planet glowed dimly blue-green with reflected light from the primary star. Like most gas giants, it was a ball of clouds that looked incredibly calm from a distance. Having been deep inside Yavin's atmosphere, Jacen knew that it should be anything but calm.
Far ahead in the distance, he could just barely see the speck of light that was supposed to be the fourth planet. As they drew closer, it became larger and larger until they could see that it was frozen solid, with one oddly-shaped moon orbiting.
"Some pretty strange readings coming off that planet," Jaina remarked from the cockpit.
"So I noticed," Kyp replied over the comm. "Looks like some sort of jamming. I should have figured they'd be expecting us."
Jacen knew that his sister was shaking her head. "It couldn't be jamming--it's on all the wrong frequencies. Wouldn't mess up anything except maybe old radionics gear. I really don't know what to make of it."
"Well, for all we know, they're just as confused about us as we are about them. Maybe they're expecting us to be using those frequencies to communicate."
"Could be. Avengers, hold course. Jaina, are you picking up anything that looks like the ExGal shuttle yet?"
"Not yet," she replied before cutting herself off. "Wait. I think I've got an ion drive trail... it's pretty diffuse, could be anywhere up to a week old."
"That matches the distress call," Kyp remarked. "Where did they go?"
"Looks like they went somewhere toward the northern hemisphere, but the trail just cuts out halfway to that moon... I'd say they were intercepted, but there's no debris anywhere. They might still be alive."
"What, on the moon?"
"Maybe."
The comm went silent for a moment, and Jacen squinted to get a better look at the planet and its moon. Now that they were closer, he noticed that it wasn't as round as one might expect a moon to be -- more disk-shaped and kind of rough looking. Around its equator, he could just barely make out what appeared to be sharply curved peaks. It was a little bit on the small side, too, now that he thought about it. A captured asteroid? he wondered.
"Miko, on my signal, you and I break and make a pass at the moon. Avengers, you are to hold back and escort the Rock Dragon until we regroup."
There was a flurry of acknowledgements and then the two X-wings separated from the rest of the squadron. Not long after that, Jaina opened the channel again.
"Kyp, Miko, you have bogeys inbound. I think that moon's their base."
"We see them," Kyp replied. "Looks like more of those rock fighters. I think we can handle it. Stay sharp."
"Copy that," Jaina replied. "Jacen, Tenel Ka, you ready?"
"Ready as ever," Jacen said.
"I am ready," Tenel Ka added.
Jaina chirped the comm. "Range in thirty seconds. Um... Kyp, heads up. Two more groups of fighters are closing in on you."
"Copy," Kyp replied tersely. "Miko, break right! Go close to the moon, let's see if we can lose them."
A moment later, the Rock Dragon entered the thick of the fray. This time, Jacen guessed that there were at least twice as many fighters as the last time. Not that it mattered much -- the molten missiles of the enemy didn't even pose much threat to the two old Z-95 Headhunters in the Avengers.
"What the kriff?" one of the pilots, who flew a B-wing if he remembered right, exclaimed. "My shields just went down!"
"I'll get 'em off your tail, Alesatt," his wingman replied. "Hang in there!"
"Mine are down too!" another pilot exclaimed. "Damn it--" then the transmission cut off in a burst of static.
"Avenger Six, do you copy?" Jaina asked. "Avenger Six! Kriff. Avenger Seven, did you see what happened?"
"Came right out of nowhere," Avenger Seven replied. "Shot cooked off his magazine."
"Avenger Eleven, what's your status?"
The B-wing pilot coughed. "I'm a little roughed up, but my shields are back."
"What happened?"
"I don't know," the pilot replied. "Arfour was babbling something about gravity and magnetic fields, then my shields went down until my wingmate blew the fighter off my tail."
As Jacen fired another burst at a passing rock-fighter, there was a scream over the comm and he saw the icon representing Avenger Nine wink out.
"Kyp, what's going on? We're under heavy fire!" Jaina exclaimed.
"Not much better," Kyp replied. "We can't shake them!"
"Maybe we should just get out of here. I think we can still outrun them," Jaina suggested.
"Agreed," Kyp replied. "Avengers, meet up at the rendezvous point. We'll be right behind you."
The Rock Dragon went into a tight turn that sent Jacen's fire wide, and he heard the sharp whine of the engines running up to full thrust.
"No shield!" Miko suddenly exclaimed. "Tractor beam!"
Jacen frowned. It was nearly impossible to snag a fighter with a tractor beam at the near-relativistic speeds they usually traveled at. Then again, they obviously weren't dealing with an enemy familiar with the term 'impossible'. Who'd ever heard of stripping fully charged shields away, anyway?
"Hang on!" Kyp answered. "Where's it coming from?"
"I can't tell!" Miko shouted. "I'm at full power but I'm still going backwards!"
Two of the symbols that represented Avengers Three and Four--a Z-95 and an X-TIE Ugly, respectively--broke from the formation and curved back toward where Kyp and Miko were.
"We're coming!" Avenger Three said.
"Negative, Negative!" Kyp shouted. "Get out of here, there are too many of them!"
"We're not leaving you," Three replied.
Kyp nearly screamed. "You kriffing idiots! Get the kriff out of here!"
There was another burst of static and Avenger Four's icon winked out.
"I see you! Hang on!"
"Avenger Three, return to formation! You have a wing of bogeys on your tail!" Jaina shouted.
"I'll make it!"
"The hell you will!" Kyp exclaimed.
"I'm hit!" Miko reported. "Port engines out! I'm losing fuel!"
"Can you eject?"
There was a brief pause, followed by a spurt of very descriptive cursing. "My hatch is jammed!"
"I'll try to break their lock," Kyp said. "Hang on! Three, this is no time for heroics. Get out of here before you get yourself killed!"
"I've got your six," Three replied.
"Damn it, Three," Kyp grumbled. "If you insist. I'm going in. Cover me."
"The hell is that?" Jaina said on the internal comm. A new symbol winked to life on Jacen's targeting screen and he squinted to see where it was in the distance. Whatever it was, it seemed to be much larger than the rocky fighters they'd been struggling with. Roughly ovoid-shaped, it came toward them slowly--and then the front of it seemed to disintegrate into a cloud of pieces.
"Wasn't me," Jacen remarked.
"Oh kriff," Jaina said. "Missiles." A cloud of red blips flashed to life on the targeting scope, suddenly seeming to streak forward toward the remnants of the Avengers.
"Miko, did it work?" Kyp asked.
"Negative," came Miko's subdued reply. "Get out of here--how's the Navy going to know what's happening out here if nobody survives to tell? I'll be fine without you guys."
"You're kidding," Kyp replied. "I'm not going to let them kill or capture you if I can help it."
"I am a Jedi," Miko intoned, "and the Force is my ally..."
Avenger Three burst into a fireball right behind Kyp. The sudden impact seemed to make up the older Jedi's mind. "We'll be back, Miko, I promise. May the Force be with you. Jaina, what's the status?"
"We can't jump yet, there are too many gravity wells."
Jacen saw one of the missiles flash by, and for a fleeting second he thought he saw wings and a tail. He tried to track another missile but it passed too fast to hit. Then he felt a thump and looked around to see where it came from. His mouth dropped as the... thing... came into sight. It wasn't even a missile at all, but a living creature. It crawled over the hull of the Rock Dragon with four stubby appendages. Vicious-looking pincers formed its mouth, and for a brief moment the creature looked at him with a beady eye.
It reminded him of a sea creature he had seen in an aquarium on one of the worlds he'd visited with his parents as a young child.
Then he snapped out of the moment and swung his turret around as fast as he could, hoping it would depress far enough to let him hit the ugly thing. At its lowest point, he fired. The first two bolts passed right over the creature, and then the lower pair of cannons spat out red bolts that blew the thing completely off the hull. His proximity alarms blared from the close hit before fading away.
"Jaina, they're firing mynocks, or some ugly relative of theirs! If we don't jump to hyperspace right now, one might chew through something important!"
"I'm trying!" she cried in desperation. "The damn thing's going crazy with all the gravity wells!"
Another of the things passed uncomfortably close and Jacen grabbed the comm again. "Just jump anywhere, damn it!"
"It got my droid!" one of the Avengers exclaimed.
Jacen saw another creature heading straight at him and blew it away with a burst of laser fire. "I don't think we have any more time!"
"Hang on!" Jaina shouted triumphantly, and the stars seemed to elongate for a brief, frozen moment of time before settling into the familiar, swirling maelstrom of hyperspace.