Private Deep Black Sea: First Contact

[Atlas Drake]

LONGJUMPER'S MARK
EN ROUTE TO YUUZHAN VONG GALAXY​

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"Emperor's iron bones!"

Captain Drake was cursing because the expedition's hyperspace tunnel no longer resembled pleasing azure hues typical of lightspeed travel. Now their surroundings glowed blood red which he couldn't help but see as an ill omen for the journey yet to come. Sensor klaxons finally activated when the freighter's instruments detected something incoming. The Longjumper's bridge hardly deserved its name, but she was a sturdy ship. He wasn't about to lose her in some bad weather.

"Looks like storm clouds on the horizon," he announced, "Drop us out of hyperspace."

Longjumper's Mark emerged on the edge of one of the biggest comet storms Drake had ever seen. Interest in exploration had waned since the Hyperspace War but if people could only see what's out here. Each Skywalker Mission launched by Outbound Flight reached farther into the unknown. Now they were going where few ever dared to tread. While plotting a route around the storm, Drake paused when he received an unexpected report.

"Comm traffic?" the captain wondered, "Out here? Patch it through."

Through heavy interference Drake could make out voices speaking in a language even their protocol droid couldn't translate. Where could it be coming from? There was nothing out here. Nowhere to transmit. He liked a good mystery. Raising the industrial comlink grille to his lips, Captain Drake flipped a toggle to activate shipwide intercom.

" Tilon Quill to the bridge."

 

[Tilon Quill]

...no anomalies that I can detect. With its power cell and focusing crystal removed, the shuttle thieves' lightsaber poses no


Tilon Quill, Auxiliary Program Specialist Xenocomms, set aside the draft report and hustled. He'd expected to spend this portion of the voyage doing grunt work for the ComScan staff, staring into assorted voids, and brushing up on his Yuuzhan Vong.

Surprise task number one — making safe the thermos-sized lightsaber abandoned by a pair of stowaways — had thrown him. Atlas Drake 's summons was surprise task number two and this time Tilon was all in. He'd felt the thrum in the deck as the Longjumper's Mark decanted. Maybe there was a distress call from a totally unknown species, or—

He veritably skidded into the bridge, a place where he hadn't spent much time. "Tilon Quill, Captain." They'd met, which was to say they'd been in the same rooms, with other people, briefly.

A comet zipped past the bridge viewport. Tilon bit back the kind of curse a Jedi Knight shouldn't know, much less use in the workplace.

 

[Atlas Drake]

"Specialist Quill."

Drake glanced up from a datapad to nod at the Jedi scientist. He was seated in a rotating command chair from which the captain radiated authority despite his tattered old Kathol Navy flight jacket. An Outbound Flight mission patch had been sewn into the fabric. When Tilon Quill echoed his earlier sentiment, he couldn't help but smirk.

"Just a little rough weather," Drake reassured him, "Nothing the Longjumper can't handle."

Comets which dwarfed the bulk freighter streaked by. Trails of cosmic dust illuminated space with almost haunting ethereal beauty. Drake had taken a few courses on comparative linguistics at the Kathol Technical Academy but that was decades ago. He needed an expert to help make sense of these transmissions. Alien cross chatter filled the bridge once he flipped a few toggles.

"Source unknown. We dropped out of hyperspace to avoid this storm front and picked them up on the relay dish. Sound like anything you've heard before?"

While he might not be fluent, Drake could at least recognize most of the major trade languages. He'd bet a pair of sylops this wasn't anything local.

 

[Tilon Quill]

Tilon took his time with it awkwardly, had it played again. The protocol droid had no referents.

"It rings a bell, Captain," Tilon said at last. "It reminds me of a family of fungoid scavver merchants my father and I met on Gadma Station, the dead Yuuzhan Vong ship at the entrance to Companion Cresh. They were...chatty while they tried to decompose us."

The pair of them had only absorbed enough of the merchants' language to bargain for a peaceful coexistence, and most of that had faded with time. The details, anyway. The core memories were chilling enough to stick around.

"There, that part I know. I think it's a demand for food. Maybe a distress beacon."

Atlas Drake

 

[Atlas Drake]

Drake took another grudging sip of stale stimcaf while he thought.

"Fungoids? We'll proceed with caution."

While Quill studied the mystery transmissions Captain Drake diverted more power to the Longjumper's sensors. Understanding slowly dawned upon his patrician features. He handed the Jedi a datapad with up to date relay logs.

"Whoever they are, looks like their signal is coming from somewhere inside the storm."

Deflector shields couldn't last long under that kind of a bombardment. The Mark was a tough old girl, but even classic Silk engineering had its limits. Further investigation seemed impossible...unless. His eyes glimmered with dangerous thoughts.

"A shuttle would have more room to maneuver," Drake reasoned, "How about it, kid? If you're right, they could be in trouble."

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

Tilon balked to an embarassing degree and tried to keep that trepidation off his face, since he couldn't keep it out of his heart. The fungoids had been, in younger days, terrifying. The comets added several layers of danger. Jedi Knight he might be, but...

But on the other hand, this was a distress call. You just plain answered distress calls. Always.

"We should have Medical dose us with antifungals, Captain, and we should wear environmental suits. If they're the species I encountered, their spores are corrosive. I'd also suggest bringing something to feed them with - to take the edge off. This is a rough place to be stranded without food; anyone would be desperate. The Science team might have a better idea, but...tinned meat, live soil?"

 

[Atlas Drake]

"Astrogation, you have the bridge."

Captain Drake winced getting into his suit. His arm still felt tender after some rough treatment by frontier medtechs. He powered up the old runabout and ran through some pre-flight checks while Tilon Quill helped load their 'peace offering' into the hold. Soil from the Longjumper's hydroponics bay synthesized with some old ration packs. Drake hoped the smell was worth it.

"Ready, kid?" he asked once the Jedi took a seat, "Relax. I'm a fair pilot. Keep a weather eye on those lifesigns for me."

Patchwork engines coughed, then roared to life. Gravity pushed them back in their seats before sluggish inertial dampeners kicked on. In no time they were hurtling through starless void on an intercept course with the comet storm. What had seemed so picturesque from a distance now loomed vast and terrifying. Drake was in fact an excellent pilot but even he began to worry about their odds.

 

[Tilon Quill]

Tilon found himself more inclined to watch the shield displays, though the shields were Atlas Drake 's job. He grimaced and tried to focus on his own roles. The instrumentation at hand was basically just the comscan panels.

"The signal's weak but I think I've got it triangulated. It's not moving at the same relative velocity as some of the comet storm - it's moving diagonal, crossways."

This whole thing felt big. Grand. Not in exciting ways, in 'I need to do this right the first time' ways. In 'Get this right or the Captain will never respect me again, and fungi people could die' ways. In ways that whispered 'you've wasted your life as a Jedi; you're not ready.'

He stretched out to the Force for calm and found only the torrent of the comet storm's natural chaos. That, and a flicker of desperate hunger.

Atlas Drake

 

[Atlas Drake]

Proximity klaxons echoed in protest while Captain Drake pushed their shuttle to the limits. They skimmed the surface of a comet bigger than most star destroyers. Despite the exhilaration he could not afford another near collision like that. Sweat began to bead along his brow from concentration. He threaded the needle between another two massive slabs of ice.

"Now this is podracing!"

Behind the bravado Atlas was getting worried. As he flew deeper into the storm everything grew denser. That meant fewer safe passages to choose from. If he ever ran out completely it would be his last mistake. Time was not on their side. Hazard lights bathed each face in an infernal glow.

"The signal's weak but I think I've got it triangulated. It's not moving at the same relative velocity as some of the comet storm - it's moving diagonal, crossways."

"Plot me a course, specialist."

Tilon Quill fed the data into their shuttle's navigation systems. Flight controls trembled in his hands while Drake tried to cleave as best as possible along a more or less stable vector. Comet impacts wrought havoc all around them before enough ice cleared to bring something into visual range. He inhaled a sharp breath at the scale of it. This was the largest purrgil the captain had ever seen. Dead of course and drifting for how long before crossing into stormy weather?

"Point of no return!" there was a glint in Drake's eye. He wanted to attempt a landing. "Quill?"

 

[Tilon Quill]

A fanciful image came to mind: a daring Jedi taking the controls, channelling the Will of the Force to pull off an improbable landing with grace. The kind of thing a Padawan might imagine, and Tilon hadn't been a Padawan in a long time. Between Captain Drake's seasoned presence and dad-joke references, and all the ways this situation made Tilon feel small, some corner of his brain had just spat out a little immaturity. A desire to transcend the limits of the real, the sensible, the predictable, and be more.

The kicker was, the Force made that an option. And an awful lot of people had gone sideways like that.

He set aside the Force and all it meant (or wanted to mean) for his sense of self, and focused on the plain choice of the moment. Drake could probably, but not certainly, pull off that landing. If he did, they'd see and set foot in a place where nobody ever had. Well, nobody but some stranded predatory fungi.

The only answer he gave the Captain was the way he held to his chair's arms, and maybe the exhilarated nerves in his sidelong glance.

As the shuttle slid in to grate along the Purrgil corpse, Tilon clipped on his helmet, not out of fear of decompression but because he was eager to go take that walk.

 

[Atlas Drake]

"So much for mag boots," Drake's comlink echoed, "We'll have to improvise."

Without something to anchor them one wrong step could send the explorers tumbling off into stormy void. Unlike the metal hull of a ship there was nothing out there for their boots to lock onto. Captain Drake unspooled some cables before hooking up their enviro-suits. An old school solution but better than nothing. At least they could pull themselves back if something went wrong. He asked if Tilon Quill was ready before cycling the airlock.

One small step for man and Drake touched down on a dead titan. He pushed back off again, using the lack of gravity to propel himself forward. Without warning, another comet slammed into the purgil like an apocalyptic meteor impact. Tremors nearly knocked the captain off his feet. Ice clouds washed over them in a surreal moment of pseudo-weather.

"We can't stay out here! Let's make for one of those craters! Maybe there's a way inside."

 

[Tilon Quill]

The shuttle's commscan systems had showed their limits in the contact-rich blizzard on final approach. Ice and purrgil pseudobone glittered in the space around them. Nothing for a cosmic distance around had much in the way of gravity. Whenever Tilon's boots kicked up detritus, those little puffs might take decades to settle. Or get obliterated by a comet's passing, of course; Tilon was keenly aware of just how little notice they'd have of a collision. He'd set the shuttle's sensors to ping them in such an event but, again...contact-rich blizzard.

They paused every twenty meters or so to anchor pitons in the purrgil, a treacherous surface. This kind of gear was meant for comets, asteroids, and drifting hulks, but this wasn't ice, hullmetal, or nickel-iron. At one point he called on the Force to strengthen his body and yanked on a piton he mistrusted, and it came right out in a spray of grit.

"They teach you to use the Force to cover all your bases in situations like this," he said as they picked their way along. "The Force can do anything. It's just that the limitation is the user. Presence of mind, judgment in the moment, picking the right niche visualization, not making things worse-"

He flinched. A heartbeat later, a cometary fragment snapped off a dry length of purrgil some distance away. The reverberation jolted grit off the surface in waves - and revealed a gap like the one Atlas Drake had been seeking. A way down into the dead purrgil, down into the spaces where the stranded fungal vessel might be trapped. What that looked like was still uncertain.

The jolt shoved him off the surface, just barely too far to make good contact again. He used the skills of a Mist-Weaver and drew a line, a tangible thing, from his hand to the surface, and pulled himself back down. Maybe he had a little presence of mind after all.