Across the Universe: To Sail Beyond the Sunset

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]​

Come, my friends/It is not too late to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/Of all the western stars​

-Virgil​

With a sigh and a roar, the Daragon crested a mountain range on Kyrikal's seventeenth moon, and left water behind. The mountains kept moisture at bay as clouds released their rainfall on the land closest to the sea. Out here, in the al'Khali, the deep desert, the old Jedi-esque virtues of patience and light and sterilization had turned the land to ash. It was a natural desolation, of course. At least, this close to the mountains. Farther inland, where the Pathfinder-class transport was bound, centuries of mining had broadened cracks in the hardpan. Huge sandworms and tikulini chewed up the land in furrows and sinkholes. A tough breed of miner dominated this world: powerful Ithorians and Mon Calamari, contemptuous of civilization and pacifism, pragmatic to a fault.

A ship had gone down here, and recently too. What a Fringe Confederation warship was doing in the Kyrikal system -- well, that was a question worth asking. Fringe hadn't said a word, and Jorus had commed his sister to no reply. No other Fringe ships had tripped the hyperspace monitors on the Mara or been spotted coming through old Sith space or the Tion Hegemony.

And this...this was not just any ship. The starship designer in him didn't much like the blistered, inelegant ovoid that protruded from the desert.

"If Kyrikal Three hadn't picked up a Fringe IFF while this sucker was on its way down, I woulda thought we were getting invaded by the Ssi-Ruuk." The Daragon inscribed a tight spiral around the crashed starship, and landed. Still peering through the viewport, Jorus rose. "I ain't seen one of these since my last trip out by Lwhekk, an' it looks like it's had work done, old ship or not. There's something screwy here, an' it won't take long for the nearest mine foreman to start thinkin' salvage rights -- if they're not here already."

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

Gloves. Boots. Arc welder and hydro spanner. Tools of the trade. And damned if it didn't feel good to trade in the clipboard and heels of a businesswoman for them. Alna Merrill had been playing fancy for far too long, but hadn't minded too much; she'd had a husband and daughter to share her life on and to spend her energy with. But marriage hadn't slowed Jorus down a bit, and eventually she'd decided she had better start participating in his adventures again instead of just hearing about them.

"Guess we'd better hurry, then." Alna decided, glancing over Jorus` shoulder at his displays. "Remind me to send Ori`Vod a quote for cleaning up her mess, too." After all, if you're good at something, you never do it for free.

Alna gave her husband's shoulder a genial swat. "The hoversled is warmed up and I've got your tools together. Let's see if you can still do a day's work without that shotgun you love sovery much." The tall, dark salvager asked, her volumes of curled hair tied back in a bouncing afro-ponytail.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

Jorus cast a lonesome look at his Mandalorian shell gun, which remained propped up beside the pilot's seat. Unloaded, naturally. He holstered his cut-down Czerka HeadBanger; that would have to do. "I dunno, Alna, a man gets awful attached to his gun once he uses it to nutshot a Sith Emperor."

The hoversled, true to Alna's word, was all warmed up, and his tools were ready, everything from hydrospanners to that sonic servodriver he couldn't quite master. That was a tool for tech nutjobs like the Bard of the Hyperlanes, not straightforward salvager folk. But it came in handy. There weren't many things better at opening doors. He clambered into the hoversled's driver seat and tapped the garage door opener. The Daragon's hangar bay split open and folded away, revealing a harsh alkali desert and a half-mile-long egg. And high above, through a washed-out sky, the gas giant and its other moons shone down.

"All aboard for the shady side."

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

"Shady side of what, though?" Alna asked with a faint smirk, climbing nimbly up to ride passenger. "You just try and not get too cooked, whitebread. I'm not about too let you cry off early because of a little sunburn." Alna teased affectionately, her old, well oiled tool belt jangling merrily as she settled into her seat.

All the old instincts were still there. As they glided smoothly over sand so white as to nearly be blinding, Alna quietly divided up the cost-per-weight and profit ratios of the wreck. Galvanized circuits were always the safe money, but on a ship like that? The hyper drive and armaments were the real sellers. If they were lucky enough to dig out an in tact navigation computer, there were likely a few people who'd like to know what the Fringe were doing out here. Alna wouldn't mind knowing that, either. But that might be one of those times that knowing a thing wasn't worth the trouble it brought you.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

"Wouldn't you know it, the wind's on the shaded side." He squinted into the breeze. "Not sure if that haze is mining efflux, or a sandstorm on the way. Sandstorms look different dependin' what planet you're on -- ever notice that?"

A gigantic, ovoid, convex hangar door hung askew above them. Twisted by impact, it left a good-sized gap. Jorus goosed the hoversled until it came level with the gap; for safety's sake, just in case the sled got away somehow, he tied a rope to a stanchion near the edge, then clambered inside the retrofitted Ssi-Ruuvi ship. His glowstick switched to beam mode, he pierced the darkness.

"This ain't no hangar I ever saw, unless it was..." He chewed his lip. "Those look like plasma torches, mag-grapples...this hangar could fit a corvette, or bigger. This is a ship for eatin' other ships."

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

"The Fringe being strange stopped surprising me ages ago." Alna commented dryly, browsing the wide array of tools and gadgets. Her own lamp illuminated a wide circle, painting what the desert light could not. "Hijacking moving ships is fairly high-end piracy... even Ironwolf didn't think it worth the risk. But this thing doesn't look like a salvage vessel." Alna mused.

Picking a plasma cutter off the wall, Alna pondered briefly. "Might be that they've already got some choice parts boxed up for us. What do you say we go hunting for the cargo bay to see what we can see?" She suggested as she flipped the cutter over in her hand before slipping it in her belt for a spare. "If my memory is still half decent, it's more or less on the way, isn't it?"

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

Jorus picked his way across the buckled, slanting hangar floor to shine a light through a huge half-open blast door. "Don't look at me -- Ssi-Ruuvi's one kind of shipbuildin' where I've never set foot. But if I was to make a ship this fat with gutting gear like this, I'd have cargo holds all equidistant an' easily accessible-"

He cut off as his beam revealed a long, wide, low-ceilinged chamber, choked with machinery.

"That," he said, "is a factory floor. Five'll get you ten there's levels like this stacked all the way through. Expensive gear, too. Adjustable metal stampers, errything. Ship like this had to have thousands of crew...but I don't see a thing, smell a thing."

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

"And if they'd done any kind of real work in here, it'd reek of ozone and carbon." Alna added in a dry tone. Dry like the desert, which did have a habit of obliviating scent the way it did moisture. That might help explain some of the lack of odor, but not all. And not in a fresh wreck. More worryingly... "Where is the crew? Even if some of them evacuated or podded, there's no bodies."

Alna slid her hand around the handle of her crowbar, suddenly a little paranoid. "Ship wreckage is cheap. I'm going to rip up some of this line equipment... manufacturing bits are big money, with half the galactic super powers hoarding their shipyards." Alna decided, strolling among the specialized disassembly equipment in search of juicy bits to take apart.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

Jorus scratched two days' worth of beard, deep in thought. "Come to think of it, I heard tell of Fringe using ships to boost their early shipyard capacity, before they took Lwhekk and Rakata Beta. Always thought it was just the ships you made for Subach, but if they were retrofitting Ssi-Ruuvi cruisers into factory ships, they coulda...let's see."

Light bobbing ahead of him, he made his way down the warped factory floor to the end of one line.

"We got starfighter parts down here!" he called. "They been using these to churn out fighters somehow or other. Means they've gotta have electronics fabrication gear aboard, an' the good stuff at that."

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

Wandering and appraising, Alna had finally found something that'd caught her trained eye; an auto-welder, a large and blocky machine typically feed parts through one end do it could produce commodities out of the other. Noting the massive cargo crane built into the buckled and not-entirely reliable bulkhead, a plan began to form. Because why not have a little fun?

Alna, standing atop the big machine, glanced toward the sound of Jorus` voice and spotted his torch bobbing at the other end of the factory line. "They left our presents all wrapped up for us? How sweet." She replied cheerfully, crouching atop the welder. "Guess you'd better put those muscley arms to work!"

She had her eyes on heavier and more stubborn prey. With a breath to steel herself, Alna leapt from her perch. For one heart-stopping moment, she felt suspended in air... and then her flailing arms managed to catch the hanging hook-and-harness of the factory lift. Her feet found no purchase, as she was swinging about thirty feet off of the factory floor, but that was fine.

Cursing her age and a few months of lifting nothing more heavy than a squirming toddler, Alna managed to pull herself up the chain until her feet could settle into the lift`s hook. The remaining ten meters or so were much easier to climb, and in short time, Alna was pulling the housing off of the lift motor with the chain wrapped around her thigh, her light in her teeth, and her wrists deep in the guts of a dead machine. Had this been in zero-g, it would have been her natural habitat.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"] came perilously close to getting a faceful of light as she made the jump. Jorus's glowrod beam flickered everywhere. He shone it off a nearby surface and watched her ascent in backglow. "Careful up there!" he called, unnecessarily, as crossed the hangar again. He pulled a small hoverpad out of the sled and looked through the gap, scanning the desert. A sandstorm was definitely in the offing.

Once inside again, he jammed the hoverpad under a particularly nice machine. The machine obliged with only occasional tippings, and he began dragging it toward the hangar and the gap. "We got a storm comin' our way," he grunted. "Maybe an hour 'til it hits."

He paused at the blast door to the hangar. The machine seemed unwilling to depart the factory floor -- about six inches too tall. With a grunt, he started climbing.

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

Alna removed the light from her teeth before she spoke, tucking it into the crux of her neck. "There's a couple day's work here. Thinkin about bringing the Daragon in closer and maybe campin' on the site." She admitted. Sure, they both wanted to avoid a dust-up with the natives, but any storm that could threaten their work would likely stop an expedition.

She found the control box she was looking for and wired it directly to her datapad. After that, a compact, but powerful battery found a home in the motor housing. Alna had been doing this long enough that she was able to roughly ballpark the required voltage, key it into the battery, et voila! The crane's motor th hrummed to life, temporarily granted a second breath via Alna's mechromancy.

With the push of a button, the powerful motor lowered her to the ground. "Your call, Jorus - just feels a waste to come out here for an hour worth of work. We could press on... If you're not afraid of riding out a storm in a wreck with your big, strong wife to protect you."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

From here in the hangar, he could just barely hear her, and he raised his voice to call back. "Hour's worth of work, feth that. We came here to do the job an' be us for a change. Wouldn't be the first storm we've ridden out. Gimme a sec to see if I can't..."

He hopped into the partially loaded hoversled and shifted it back away from the vessel. Hot light played over the back of his neck. He goosed the repulsorlifts, twisted just so, and the whole sled grated its way through the gap into the hangar. The repulsor vehicle skidded to a stop against a gigantic plasma torch. Jorus powered down and headed back into the factory floor.

"Sled's locked down in the hangar so the sandstorm don't take it. Think we're good to move on." He fired up the glowstick function of the glowrod, and gestured at a twisted rent in a wall. "I'm thinkin' about that navicomputer."

 

[Alndys]

((Wrong account))

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

"Then have at it, handsome!" Alna crowed as the cargo harness lowered her slowly towards the uneven bulkhead. For a brief moment, she couldn't help but think of those graceful ribbon riders you could sometimes catch on Zeltros - men and women who somehow made a rope out length of silk seem erotic as they hung perilously in the air. Not that anyone would mistake Alna Merrill for one of those sex idols, with her dirty hands, sturdy frame and coveralls, clinging to a rusty hook and chain. She had a grave all her own, to be sure, but it was the almost plodding, steady movements of a person at work in a field they have become immensely comfortable in. An ease with her tools, fluid steps in heavy steel toe boots, without a movement wasted on something not related to the job at hand. "Lemme know if you need me for any slicing; mayhap Ori`Vod has been too busy to change her maintenance codes since we dug through the Chimarae."

Aside from the sly wink she tossed her husband as she slid from her perch and onto solid ground. Seasoned dancer she was not, but so long as she could pull the right man's eye, the daughter of Hagrin D`Lessio reckoned she was doing alright.

That bit off preamble done, Alna set to loosening the auto welder from it's sturdy housing in the floor. Even with the mechanical assistance of her hydro spanner, it was slow going, requiring her to put her full weight into breaking the bolts, straining until the lean muscles of her arms burned with protest and the veins of her neck appeared. With a gasp, Alna felt the first bolt give - removing it was laughably easy after that, the kind of task she almost reflexively called Mara to do. But the girl wasn't here, she was safe at home. Next time, maybe.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

Others might not mistake Alna for somethin' worthy of idolatrous and covetous regard, but you couldn't tear Jorus' cybernetic eyes away from her as she power-glided her way down the retrofitted cable winch. He watched her until she got to work on that bolt, then knelt by another cleat and rummaged in his toolbelt. "Gimme a sec, I've got...here's the fether."

The sonic servodriver whirred on its simplest possible setting. Rust flaked away and shuddered across the floor. A bolt vibrated loose, and a normal quickwrench took that out just fine. A good quickwrench was a man's best friend, a one-way adjustable ratchet. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam got the bolt far enough out to do it by hand.

A howl of wind rose in the next room, the hangar bay. Sand swirled in, then formed a thin and constant curtain as it skimmed past one side of the doorframe. Jorus sat back and took a look with the glowrod. "Looks like the storm's in earnest."

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

"Gimme that, you lazy cuss." Alna complained, snatching the quickwrench out of her husband's filthy mitts. It helped that he was distracted by howling winds and sands, and she stood up to get a better look for herself. Stretching her legs out, hands on her hips, Alna glanced at the swirling eddies of sand and sillica trying to pervade deeper and deeper into the ship. "Might be smart to try and put a tarp up over that door. Keep the sand out while we work." She decided absently, the screwdriver buzzling merrily in her hand.

But then she pondered. A sandstorm wasn't an event many people got to see the inside of, after all - most folk tended to hunker down as soon as one started coming. Even if it was liable to be all sworling beige and white, Alna decided she had to see - and there were windows up built into the part of the ship that pointed accusingly at the skies that'd forsaken it forever. "I'm going to take five, Jor, and go see what I can see from the top of the ship." Alna explained - the statement that she was going was a clear enough invitiation. Whipping her gloves off, Alna disengaged her remote sustenance of the lift engine and strode briskly for other parts.

Suddenly, few things in the world were more important than seeing what the inside of this sandstorm looked like. Very few things, indeed.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

The autowelder lost a good bit of importance as he watched her walk away. "Don't lose my quickwrench," he said. Hands on his knees got him up from the warped factory-floor deck. Sand skittered over his boots.

The urge to take a look rose in him as soon as he figured out what she was after. A standard emergency access shaft beckoned, a steep switchback of metal stairs made for human feet. "Watch for enclision grids," he said as they rose. "Hexagon patterns. The stock ship had'em to keep workers in line. I think Fringe probably removed'em when they retrofitted this beast, but you never know. Lightning everywhere if it goes wrong."

 

[Alndys]

@[member="Jorus Merrill"]

Alna waved vaguely at the warning - she was well aware, after all. She didn't think the wreck had enough left in it to power enclison grids, personally, but she'd been keeping an eye out for 'em anyway.

An instinctive knowledge of ship design and a glance over the schematics before landing was all Alna needed to be able to confidently make her way through the destroyed ship, hearing the hull creak and groan as the sandstorm outside picked up strength. Howling winds battered durasteel, silica pounding away at a structure that, like anything else in the desert, would eventually give way to the barrage and become little more than a gutted skeleton. Then, some day, it would sink beneath the sands and functionally cease to exist forever. Good thing they'd be long gone by the time that happened.

Her feet brought up higher and higher up in the carcass of the Fringe ship, to the point where the drunken sway of the wreck was perceptible under one's feet. Eventually, she found the rear command bridge - the bridge itself had been buried under the sand when they arrived. It wouldn't be affording any kind of an interesting view, and Alndys couldn't help but wonder if the bridge windows had broken in impact. If so, the bottom quarter of the ship was no doubt flooded with fine sand by now. Sand that'd act as an anchor of sorts, keeping the 'finger' upright and accusing the heavens for some time.

Despite the swirling, endless sandstorm, there was light. The rear command bridge was flooded with it - flickering, brownish light that struggled to peek through the storm's wrath, flickering and fluttering with each gust of the infinite winds. It was hypnotic in a way, a natural strobe-light. Sand threw itself against the wide window: resulting in a rustling sound from millions upon millions of sand particles. It wasn't unlike the sound of rain, but distinct all it's own. An everyday sound for someone who lived in the desert, but new and precious to Alna Merrill.

She took Jorus' hand and stepped forward, surprised that the heavy falls of her boots was muffled by the deceptively quiet-like sound of the storm. The peeks of light danced across the couple and the bridge around them, almost welcoming them to a show that they were surely the only two to see. Sandstorms were destructive and killing forces of nature - but even they could be beautiful, given a chance.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

@[member="Alna Merrill"]

Their hands slipped together, and she led him into the bridge.

"Now that's a view and a half," he said after a long moment. He placed his hand flat against the transparisteel, watched sand grains score the window in feathery crosshatches. And this was durable stuff, capable of shrugging off a nuclear blast. "I'm watchin' this in the infrared. You should see the heat. It's like...current or something. Water over rocks, or..."

As they so often did, words failed him. He let go to kneel on the angled deck, where stray sand had collected in a thin line between the deck and one of the broader consoles. "We've got a microleak here somewhere, maybe a few compartments away. Or who knows, maybe this is grit from another system. Maybe someone tracked sand aboard. Then again," he admitted, standing, "that coulda happened just as easily here. I mean, however this ship got to this system, however empty it is right now, someone was aboard at some point. Some joker mighta ridden it down from orbit. Plenty of room in here for some kinda crash pod, or something else that'd let fools take the long ride down."

He squinted out through the sand. "Hold up. Infrared."

Somehow, impossibly, the vessel shifted. "There's something alive out there. Something big."