Field Trip

[Jorus Merrill]

The Subjugator assault ship, a frigate-scale carrier, had a nice quick class-one hyperdrive and a solid navicomputer. Jorus, being Jorus, disconnected the latter and spent a good chunk of time tinkering with the former. The skeleton crew, twenty-six plus him, comprised loyal Antarian Rangers and Jedi, people who'd fought against this very ship when the Sith Empire had used it. The hangars held pilot droids and KDY Blackbird stealth fighters, expensive little things. The cargo bays held sheets of nullification resin and, wrapped within them, powerful Dark Side artifacts of several varieties. The droids had quantum-linked comms, infinite range but only useful if the summoner had the matching comm.

Force alone knew that nothing was going to get called back without it. Not over extragalactic distances.

This little crew of twenty-six was about to go where no man had gone before.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Each Blackbird had been stripped down by high-security tech crews, analyzed for anything resembling a tracking device or the Nightsister blood trails that his sister and others tended to use. The ships had come straight from the manufacturer, but who could know whether the One Sith had people inside KDY at some level. The Subjugator had gone through a similar rebuild-check, at some point during the conquest of the Sith Empire; the Republic had used it for some kind of covert operation.

The Blackbirds themselves had been coated in nullification resin - it would melt off from reentry heat if they entered atmo, but in space it worked just fine. A thicker layer of nullification resin lined the little seventy-kilo-rating cargo hold of each Blackbird, as well as the small, secure vault room on the Subjugator.

Their last stop in this galaxy was Korriban. The Gypsymoth arced down from the Subjugator's hangar bay.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Try as he might, he couldn't find much in the way of detail as to how, exactly, Carn Dicksta had sealed away Dreypa's talisman. All things considered, from the records available, it seemed as though the former Grandbastard hadn't actually...finished the job. He'd just traipsed through Korriban for long enough to back up his claims, and left Dreypa's talisman exactly where it was. Apparently. It was either worthlessness on a grand scale or the worst bookkeeping in recorded history.

Either way, Jorus was unimpressed. The Gypsymoth descended on the crypt of Dreypa, and Jorus buckled on his shell belt. The Mandalorian shell gun emerged from its lair. He took a Korriban Compass of his sister's make -- alchemical though it was, it was too useful to ignore.

The door yawned open. Two Watchers, massive stone statues, repelled him at the gate, with an invisible barrier of denial. The shell gun roared twice.

"Knock knock."

 

[Jorus Merrill]

The Korriban jump had, admittedly, been a test drive of sorts. He didn't know the Subjugator too well, and acting as a ship's navicomputer generally took a bit of familiarity with the ship in question. But here he was, so it had worked. Important preliminary step, it was, when this project meant navigating a twenty-three-microjump gap int eh hyperspace disturbance at the galaxy's edge. Good thing to get out of the way.

He reloaded as he descended the wide stone ramps into Dreypa's crypt. One shell AOE CryoBan, one shell concussion, a pretty decent loadout when facing very large, very fast, very strong critters that came in swarms. He had enough of those shells, too, prioritizing belt space. K'lor'slugs froze and shattered, froze and shattered, went flying here or there. Watchers cracked and fell apart under his ministrations. A Dark Side spirit loomed up before him; he said, and I quote, "You don't exist anymore, bub. Not my problem."

And then he walked right through it. Time was too short to waste it on fearing shadows.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Maybe Dista had come this way, gotten this far -- maybe the remains of slaughtered guardians had been consumed by the k'lor'slugs or by the tuk'ata that prowled in the shadows. Sentient or close enough, Rave had said. He didn't have the learning to speak any language they understood, save for the gun. Immense, made of solid beskar, double-barrelled, break-action, eight-gauge. In close confines he used active-cancellation ear protection, and these were very close confines.

The tuk'ata formed a solid wall at his back when he cracked the final door, a heavy thing of hijarna-tough stone. Maybe Dista had dropped it, maybe not, Jorus was no archaeologist to read changes in crevice-dust. The tuk'ata withdrew when he put CryoBan after CryoBan and conc round after conc round into the door, filling tunnels with frozen stone shrapnel. Jorus picked up more than a few cuts himself.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Lacking Force senses of any explicit kind, he had no idea what awaited behind the door. More guardians, presumably, or traps. He selected his shells by gut instinct, not knowing what they might be, and slotted them in while their predecessors joined the pile of spent brass.

Through chilled air and frosty stone, he entered the shrine of Dreypa. The Korriban Compass pointed to a stone edifice -- and to two statues, like Watchers but more detailed. Motion caught his eye, stone hands rising to point at him-

He fired once at each. Sith lightning met expanding webs of superconductor, and got nowhere near him. From there, it was just a matter of bludgeoning the trapped statues with his gunstock, collecting his brass, and CryoBan cracking the vault.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

Two hours later, with tuk'ata clawmarks all over him, he took a pretty substantial nap aboard the Subjugator in orbit. Not what some expected from a Jedi, let alone a member - hah! - of the Jedi Council. But naps, he insisted when pressed, were crucial to serenity.

Of all the things he'd picked up from guardianship of the Great Holocron, the best was certainly the value of a nap.

He awoke mildly feverish despite the antibiotics, but that was neither here nor there. A handful of jumps, all guided by him, got them to the nearest undetectable breach point. No navicomputer to record their location, their vectors.

ExGal Jump one of twenty-three began.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

They emerged, at last, a good ways outside the galaxy, and it was then that Jorus took another nap. The twenty-six could take a few hours to look around, to see the Big Empty. Jorus slept the sleep of the just.

Upon waking, he had his work cut out for him. The Dreypa talisman, in its nullification-resin case, wound up in the resined hold of one resined Blackbird. The holocron of Belia Darzu went in another, the Tund datacron in another. Other ships, expensive little suckers that they were, held some of the nastier White-level-security items taken from Korriban. Still other ships went out empty. After those were filled at some future point, later installments, other Blackbirds, could be dropped off by the Gypsymoth, but this initial push had required the larger ship.

The Blackbirds and their contents, shielded from the Force and from all sensors, departed from the Subjugator and vanished into hyperspace. They'd make several extragalactic jumps, wandering quietly until called for with quantum-locked comms -- mates to the ones held by the Grandmaster and by Jorus, and to none other.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

He returned, eventually, not in the ship he'd taken but in the Gypsymoth. Extragalactic voyages were about the only contemplative time he had. He did his best, he really did, but the demands of the Jedi Order didn't end with death, presumed or otherwise. Among his many errands -- gifting safe-house locations to promising young Jedi faithful, running guns to occupied worlds and those about to be, planting seeds in satellite galaxies -- a nice long extragalactic straightaway ranked near the top.

Ship by ship, he quantum-commed each Blackbird, brought in each stealth fighter, swapped out the taozin amulets, shored up the nullification resin, and -- where appropriate -- added new quantum-comm arrays linked to tiny audio projectors and receivers. In essence, every secreted-away Jedi holocron got a microphone and a set of speakers, a tiny little untraceable quantum radio.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

The other end of each battery of quantum ansible connections was held in what he'd dubbed a Jedi Order Library Card, a special order from a very large company that owed him its existence. Silk Holdings, to be precise: one of the largest and most powerful tech conglomerates in the galaxies. Quantum ansible technology was expensive but basic; he'd used theirs for the initial connections that linked him and the Grandmaster to the Force-nulled pilot droids that flew the Blackbirds. These connections, and the systems of priority and sorting at each end of said connections, were more complex, but only in the sense of trying to hold onto a bunch of tin-can-and-string telephones. The end result was a surprisingly compact audio device, an earpiece designed for meditation or cockpit transit. The bulk of them would go to the Jedi Order, though he'd certainly keep some for the wiser Levantines.

He pondered giving some to the other Selabites he knew, but the last thing he needed was to get asked why Ayden Cater's voice was interrogating the Codex of Tython or something.