I'm a Rocket Man (Mephirium)

[Salem Norongachi]

Home.

The entire ship was ablaze in red emergency lighting, sparks and coolant cascading down her corridors. The Hand of Fate bled.

Get me Home.

The super structure groaned, a loyal beast breaking its back against the strain. He drove her onward against the crushing vortex. All thought, all reason, all instinct bent toward this single task. A gurgling cough sent crimson across his chin and the effort to stave off the fit left him groggy and dazed.

Emah was saying something, yelling something, but all of that was beyond his comprehension. A static outwith the battle in his mind, in the force, against the immovable that he had bested before.

You weren't alone then.

The insidious thought struck like a viper and cut deeper than the meat clever hacking at his skull or the bone deep fatigue that had got him this far. He only had to keep it up a little longer, to keep the field of force energy that pulsed and swirled around them, allowing the ship to pierce like a drill through this weakened section of the Divide and take them to the other side.

His left eye gave out, he felt more than heard a blood vessel pop, and ground his teeth almost to the root against the agony, all the while his mind fought. A titanic will against forces beyond his ken, a singular focus keeping the shield of energy spinning in tune with the Hyperdrive engines. Forward, forward, forward.

Another deck vented into space, another blast door came down. Maintenance droids who had fought valiantly to stave off the damage were gone, specks in the darkness, lost among the debris. Now the entire mile length of the Imperial Star Destroyer was shaking. Every rivet vibrating, every seal threatening to give way and Salem Norongachi held its fate in his hand. His will against the inevitable.

Let me sleep.

Whatever desires he had, whatever motivation got him to this point ran up against a wall of mortal frailty. No matter how powerful you were, no matter what you called yourself, or who you had studied under; The flesh betrayed. He sagged, a warm blanket falling across his body and his mind, it told him that it was okay to sleep, all of this was a problem for later.

Its my turn, sir.

A radiance filled his failing mind. A presence he could no more mistake than his own. Quiet at first, broken, then a fury, a typhoon in the immaterial. It picked up the great weight he had carried for so long and shouldered it. Salem struggled, fought against the groping hands that threatened to drag him down into the black. He knew what this meant and with terror he rose to scream.

"Don't!"

In the medical bay, in the complex apparatus of life support machines, the man who had been Ghent lay. His right side was gone, a blackened mess of burned and fused tissue, a single eye of clear green stared into the beyond and Ghent took up the burden that his master no longer could. The ship stuttered, shook, and then with a wheeze from ruined lungs Ghent completed his final duty.

[member="Darth Mephirium"]

 

[Placeholder 04]

It was shattered and twisted like some cadaver come crawling from a rotting grave. The metal flash was naught but charred cinder, and the steel bones that held the valiant beast together clung to each other by sheer force of will. She spun in the silence of the void; devoid of light and lost to the cosmos.

Her death throes had shaken the Great Ocean more violently than anything else he had ever experienced, and Darth Mephirium was witness to a great many tragedies.

The vessel was a sleek black arrow against nebula that thrummed with a multitude of colors. She slipped through the stars like an unseen predator; stalking the gravely wounded beast that had torn itself from the hyperlanes. She was alone; a crippled creature in hostile waters begging for release.

He could feel them aboard: some amalgamation of beings whom he did not know. One had given himself to save the vessel. Mephirium had felt him expire like a dying sun, the faint remnant of his life extinguished to save his comrades.

Part of it hurt. Cyril wasn't sure why -- he had no idea whom these people were, only that their plight had been enough to draw him from the edge of the galaxy. He did not come to feed upon the carrion, no, but to examine; perhaps even help, should his heart find a place for it.

Alone, the carrion scavenger sidled up to the ailing Star Destroyer. She did not hide herself from detection, though her sleek black frame made her a bit of a ghost within the void.

A single message was sent through the local 'net to the vessel, just as an intership umbilical reached tentatively to unite with the dying vessel's ruined hull.

Let me help.

[member="Salem Norongachi"]

 

[Salem Norongachi]

The deceleration threw him to the floor, face smacking against metal, lip cracking and splashing red across the tiles. He dragged himself around the command chair with a fervor. Where he was going only Emah knew, she could hear and feel the flat line as well as Salem could in the Force.

How she wished she could pick him up, carry him to the turbo lift and take him to his brother but she couldn't, she was as helpless as Salem and doomed to watch his desolated journey. The hand over hand crawl, the ache, the pain, the short corridor that became unfathomably long. No matter what came between them Emah knew he wouldn't stop, if the whole section vented into space the stupid idiot would continue to claw and struggle until the blood froze in his veins.

The turbo lift thrummed beneath him, every tiny vibration jarring tender muscle and a single eye gazed up at the floor indicator. It felt like the gravity of the ship had been set against his chest, he heaved for a lungful of air, riding the wave of adrenaline and all consuming desperation that brought him to the edge of clawing at the seam on the turbolift door.

Emah was waiting for him. The single room cast in a stark light over a single body. She couldn't say who looked worse, if you swapped them places no one could tell. He didn't need to see his brother, not to confirm his death, but the fragile human part of him had to see with his own eyes. There was no strength in him but he stood, he dragged himself up the door frame of the medibay and held on, struggling to look at the crisp white sheets draped across a form that could have surely been his own. He can't move further, if he does, if he takes a step forward then its real. Beyond what he knows what he feels, what he knows, it isn't real until he looks into his younger brothers eyes, until he sees that the best of them is somewhere better, beyond the hurt and the pain and the life they were destined.

Whether by providence or cruelty, Salem Norongachi never gets the chance.

"Sir, I'm detecting a ship on approach."

[member="Darth Mephirium"]

 

[Placeholder 04]

He felt it long before she Carrion Shard ever touched upon the metal flesh of the wounded destroyer. It was a faint ripple in the great ocean; such an antithesis to the terrible violence that had created cyclones and hurricanes in the ethereal that it held more weight than any wanton destruction every could.

It was the death of a star, the slaughter of worlds. It was the snuffing of dreams and the eternal lie that was the promise of life pulling another spot of purity into its terrible embrace. It was the end of time and life and everything anyone had ever known. It all came from a man. Not a remarkable one, for he was naught but wounded soul upon an bloodied queen, but a man nonetheless. He had dreams and aspirations, and a being whom loved him more than it loved itself to grieve for him.

He was everything Mephirium could never be, and his altruistic death shook the Sith Lord to his very marrow. It was unfair: wrong. Mephiirum did not know why the death affected him so, for what man cried over the end of a stranger, but he felt it nonetheless. He suspected it was the effects of such raw pain being torn through the ethereal realm, and his body's reaction to that pain, but it was hard to tell.

"Peace," he whispered to himself, just as the umbilical clicked in place with the received of the Star Destroyer. With a simple flexing of his mind, Mephirium willed the doors open. Hot air and suffocating smoke rushed out to great him. Coughing, Mephirium pressed his sleeve to his face and bid himself to hold his breath. With the origin point of the emotional pulse as his guide, the errant warrior stumbled through smoke-choke corridors toward the medbay.

[member="Salem Norongachi"]

 

[Salem Norongachi]

There was nothing but a lie to him as he drew himself up and forced himself to look away from the corpse in the medbay. "Where are they docking?" he asked, feeling the weakness in his legs as he tried to take a step into the corridor.

"Deck 73."

"What kind of boarding party?" Salem had nothing else but to fake it, his arms hung heavy at his side, his left eye was still dark. If it came to a fight he would die and at this point he welcomed it. Emah would obliterate the entire ship before it was taken but not if he was still alive upon it. A hand a wall kept him upright, his head held high, black hair plastered to his forehead, and green eyes burning with the desire of a man with nothing to lose.

The bronzium hilt of his saber clanged painfully against his thigh. If the intruder was a drunk spacer he might get to use it, if he was half way competent then the odds diminished greatly. It didn't matter, his whole existence hung in the void somewhere between here and there. It didn't matter anymore.

The turbolift sped up the decks with quiet reflection that his body didn't need, and stepped out on to 73. He'd never run a marathon before, but he imagined this was how drained the runners might feel, their entire being hollow and driven by some ethereal engine to go on. He couldn't tell if it was spite or hubris that kept him standing as he rounded the corner. The airlock hissed as it cycled and Salem Norongachi placed himself before it.

[member="Darth Mephirium"]

 

[Placeholder 04]

The figure that deemed to stand before Mephirium was broken. It was a walking corpse; a cadaver begging for release. The sirens of the vessel wailed around it, and suffocating smoke the color of basalt seemed to move in a cocoon around its form as if it was avoiding something truly terrible.

Eyes of stone and storms fell to the weapon at the hip of the mass of broken flesh and shattered bones, and Mephirium felt only pity. He had no fear of this creature; this ruined thing that had lost everything it may have ever valued. The pinprick of altruism that had preserved this man had brought Mephirium here, and he decided that simply letting the stranger perish would be both counter-intuitive to his designs, and that it would simply be wrong to leave him to his suffering.

Procuring this vessel, no matter how damaged it might have been, was a plus and almost a certainty, but Mephirium's compassion got the better of him.

The clouds of hatred and terrible pain that clung to this man made it impossible to truly ascertain his intentions, but Mephirium could guess from a human standpoint just what this stranger intended to do with that lightsaber.

Clad in the armor he had worn throughout the great crusades and his ascension, Mephirium was the antithesis of this man. He was fresh and ready for the bloodletting, whereas this one might as well have been dead already. He already knew how a true battle would go.

Cybernetic fingers outstretched toward the dark haired man. Hands of the ethereal stretched out beyond his fingertips to caress the man in a gentle embrace, one meant to pacify, like that of a mother holding a child to her breast, rather than to harm.

"Whatever it is you have suffered -- despite the agony you are feeling," Mephirium spoke, "It would be a betrayal to whomever died saving this vessel to skewer yourself on my blade now."

[member="Salem Norongachi"]

 

[Salem Norongachi]

Norongachi wasn't entirely sure if the deck, or himself, were swaying. It could have been both, he thought absentmindedly as the airlock went through its motions. Death or salvation lay on the other side of the durasteel and he could no more tell than he could stop his legs from quivering under his weight. The Force, at once a symphony and the roar of a forgotten beast had been reduced to a painful hiss of mental static and stabbing flickers of light that he could not decipher. If only he could stop his head from ringing. If only he could draw a full breath into his lungs. If only he had an hour...

The door opened and Salem would have braced himself, if it were within his power to do so, instead he tilted backwards, the wall of the corridor catching and supporting his failing body. The boarder didn't make a play for his weapon or have at his back twenty men with insidious thoughts of capture and murder in their minds. One man, Norongachi thought, couldn't take the Fate. Emah already had the remaining reactors teetering on the edge of total overload, the final protocol in the event that no one remained to defend or command her.

"I'm tired as hell..." He slurred quietly even as the man spoke, not hearing the words or comprehending their meaning. He was done and signaled as much by falling sideways to the floor.

[member="Darth Mephirium"]

 

[Placeholder 04]

This one, much like the other, was fading. Mephirium felt the beats of his heart slow to such a cadence that most would have thought him dead. He examined the stranger's terrible wounds with the eye of a detached physician. Whatever had gone one here, whomever had died to save this ship, letting this man expire would leave their efforts in vain. The decision was an easy one to make. If Mephirium had given his life in such a way, he would have wanted anyone, even a man of his caliber to finish the job.

The thrum of alarms rang in his ears and distorted his concentration breaking his hold over the Great Ocean. He could not repair this man so long as those alarms continued to blare. Mephirium's brow furrowed and a curse spilled from his lips; there was no time to waste.

The medical bay aboard his own shuttle was woefully inadequate for this man's wounds. The stranger's Star Destroyer was a massive thing, and it was logical that the bay it housed would prove to be more than adequate. Mephirium moved to hoist the man over his shoulder as gently as a Gundark carrying its young. He grumbled and scowled, tracing his way through the bleeding vessel towards where he thought the medbay might be. Most of these ships were designed similarly for the sake of convenience, and the medical areas tended to be in the same spot every time.

He could only hope that was the case this time.

"Stang, you're fat."

[member="Salem Norongachi"]

 

[Salem Norongachi]

Emah was not infallible, despite what her currently dying commander may have thought. If the number of matters that required her attention reached a certain threshold then she became as prone to error as any sentient. Currently the list of issues she was dealing with were as follows;
Fifty-seven separate fires across the ship, not including those on decks with operational fire suppression. At least six serious hull breaches spanning several decks. A sensor network with more holes than a fisherman's net. A reactor spewing extremely toxic coolant into the ships atmosphere, which was fine, life support was essentially crippled on half the ship anyway. A non-functional internal defense system. A quad-turbolaser on the starboard battery that had taken it into its head to spin in circles and fire at seemly random intervals. Power surges that required constant shunting, rerouting and attention lest they overload their respective conduits and add more fire and destruction to the party. A skeleton crew of half trashed droids to deal with the aforementioned. The doomsday protocol where the remaining reactors were primed, ready, and totally willing to atomize the whole mess, which involved meticulous adjustments to their power levels lest they go off prematurely and to top it off, in the middle of all this, a lippy Caf machine in the canteen that really wanted its filter replaced and all other crisis be damned.

And Ghent had died and she could do nothing, and Tesla...and Aysen..and Harkin. They had all drawn their final breaths in the darkness where few dared to tread, all of them on her watch. No, Emah was not infallible. She was barely holding on as she professionally worked her way through the problems all the while envying that bloody Caf machine. Machines shouldn't feel, it wasn't fair to force guilt and loss on something that had no natural way to grieve.

"I don't know where you're going," She said, through the corridors com-system while keeping a casual eye on their intruder. "but there isn't anything of value in that direction, unless you have a fondness for fire." She tried to access the corridors auto-turrets and got nothing. Whatever plans this man had for the ship and her dying commander, he had a very narrow window to accomplish it. As soon as Salem Norongachi's heart stopped, they were all space dust.

[member="Darth Mephirium"]

 

[Placeholder 04]

Well, that answered his question.

He had half a mind to ask her where the medbay might have been, but then he suspected it might very well be on fire right now. As skilled as Mephirium was in dealing with crisis in general, he could not just wish away a fire. He would have to do this the magical way, or in no way at all. Cursing, he gently lowered Salem to the floor and prayed that the smoke the man had inhaled wasn't going to kill him outright. Mephirium had no way of knowing that this man's death would mean his own a well, nor did he care all that much. No one else was dying on his watch.

"Frak, frak, frak, frak -- okay, don't move." He cursed to himself, removing his gloves to place his hands down flat upon Salem's chest. He removed his mind from the physical and entered the ethereal, focused on the stranger's wavering spirit, and dove in. He felt Salem's body in a way that transcended simple touch. Within moments, he understood the damages inflicted: the contusions, lacerations, and everything else that was going to make his life hell.

At first, his thoughts drifted to the internal bleeding. That was the easiest to deal with. He simply forced the blood elsewhere, holding it in thin little lines along the broken veins. Where the tissue died, he willed it to collapse in on itself. He felt for the proteins and other substances required to mend a body; delved into the genetic makeup of the stranger's flesh and encouraged it all to come together. Cells reproduced at speeds thirty times that of normal, ruined tissue and flesh replaced with wholly organic replacements. The work was only half done, and a simple jarring would undue all the effort Mephirium had put in, but it might keep him alive for now.

Then came the bones and other nasty bits. He took a moment to catch his breath before delving further, and found his limbs to be shaky and his eyes dreary. He'd forgotten how taxing this could be.

"I don't know where you're coming from," he spoke out to the voice, "But your friend's body does not like to cooperate. You sure he isn't trying to just kill himself?"

[member="Salem Norongachi"]

 

[Salem Norongachi]

Electric brows creased as Emah watched with eyes unseen. The Force? There was no other explanation for it. While she understood the theory, and possessed a vast and ever growing library of data on this cosmic energy, she could no more detect it that the human eye could track a photon. So, the intruder was attuned, the same as Salem, to what degree was a mystery but he had found them...wherever here was, she still hadn't taken the time to check and with external and long range scanners shot, there wouldn't have been much chance of an accurate reading.

"I don't know where you're coming from," the man spoke, "But your friend's body does not like to cooperate. You sure he isn't trying to just kill himself?"

She took the space between seconds to consider that, which was all she needed to play out the arguments for and against the possibility that Norongachi had simply given up on life and then responded. "He doesn't get to die," she wasn't entirely sure what emotion she was feeling when she said those words, anger, contempt or conviction? "I'm uploading the safest route to the bridge to your armours on-board computer, get him there."

It was all she could do right now, it would take longer to explain the old mans physiological quirks when she could just show him. In the mean time she set about sealing and securing the specified path, vented the inferno burning its way across the ship into space and moved onto the next problem.

[member="Darth Mephirium"]

 

[Placeholder 04]

Mephirium had not dealt with many AIs. Nonetheless, he keenly recalled reading somewhere that the unreal creatures were not supposed to have emotions. At least, not of the human variety. Then again, a number of droids had developed some semblance of sentient after going many years without a memory wipe; maybe this one was the same. He could not say how he knew that the voice speaking to him did not belong to a creature of flesh and blood, only that he was sure that it did not. Perhaps it was because he felt nothing on the other end, or perhaps it was simple intuition.

The matter was more or less irrelevant, anyway.

Heaving the man up over his shoulder took far more effort than he was keen to admit. As much as he hated it, Cyril was getting older. Places were starting to creak that had responded fluidly in the past, and the desire to just sit down was ever-present. He ignored such thoughts, instead doing as the voice said. A track was uploaded to his wrist-mounted datapad, which he followed dutifully.

The walk was a long one, but he managed. The not-corpse seemed to have stabilized somewhat, though to what degree Cyril wouldn't know until he could examine him further. Keeping the ship from falling apart around them was a bit more important at the moment, as no matter what he might do, if the vessel went up in flames, it would not matter.

Grumbling and breathing heavily, he and his living tote bag arrived at the bridge entrance.

"Right," he breathed, lowering Salem into one of the command chairs. "What needs doing to keep this thing from collapsing in on itself?"

[member="Salem Norongachi"]

 

[Salem Norongachi]

Emah followed their progresses, like a buzz in the back of her mind she tracked them while the real work, of keeping the titanic body of war that she had fought so hard to attain, from killing them all. The hull breaches she could do little about with the contingent of repair droids she still had operational, the final protocol she made the executive decision to abort. The reactors power was brought down to marginal levels, enough to keep life support, gravity and lights active on the deck where the bridge resided but little more. The other reactor she simply shut down and stopped the influx of coolant, one more problem solved. The errant turbolaser was dealt with by the former, with no power it stopped spewing crimson into space.

The Caf machine could bloody wait.

"Door on the right," she spoke trying to materialize her holo-light form but the entire system was so frakked that only a flicker of blueish light appeared before dying instantly. "It has a fully stocked med-supply. When you get in there, console on the desk to the left. Pull up OMEGA-PROTOCOL; ADDENDUM- SIX-SEVEN-FIVE-THREE. It will tell you what you need to do. I've given you access to the file."

She understood the genetic and physical changes that had been made in Norongachi's construction, Salem had made extensive notes and scoured a galaxy that no longer existed to bring them together into a full breakdown of what made him different, in this instance it was the accelerated regeneration of his body. It was only later that the product of Palpatines tampering with life itself realized that most Force Users operated on the mundane; His body perfectly replicated his cells, its knitted bone and sinew far faster and thus when those who sought to heal him through the power of the Force applied their talents, they inevitably hampered the process already in motion. What they knew was a quagmire and his body was quick silver, they couldn't keep up with the rapid changes.

Be quick the file said in a footnote, from Norongachi's own hand, if it wouldn't kill him focus on what would and work from the top down.

[member="Darth Mephirium"]

 

[Placeholder 04]

Cyril was in too much of a hurry to reply to the AI verbally He simply followed orders, barging through the door with about asmuch finesse as a drunken rancor. He tripped over himself as he came through the door, and it was only be sheer luck alone that Salem did not go flying across the room. He braced a mechanical arm against the nearest wall and took in the room. It was a little cramped for his tastes, but there was just enough room to operate efficiently. Perhaps the room had been designed specifically for Salem in mind -- Cyril would need to ask later.

Left with nothing but the disembodied voice for company, Cyril had no qualms about speaking. He cursed like a sailor and loud like a sailor; every other word that fell from his lips being some variation of a common profanity. All the while he examined the file that he been pulled up on the adjacent terminal. His eyes glanced over words like Project Omega and Norongachi; cataloging them away for later inquiries. The information about Salem's unique cellular structure made him cringe. The processes he had undergone likely caused more harm than good, then.

"Would have been nice to know about this from the get go," he complained, "Just saying."

With a surgeon's practice, he began following the rather tedious instructions provided by the terminal. Much of it made little sense to Cyril, but he decided to trust in this AI.

After all, the knew the stranger a hell of a lot better than he did.

[member="Salem Norongachi"]

 

[Salem Norongachi]

Somewhere in the darkness between half-life and death Salem Norongachi resided. Like a man dreaming he had only a tenuous hold on what was happening beyond the few firing neurons in his mind. There was a peace here floating in the nothing, a pitstop between worlds, while he waited for whatever was supposed to happen, to happen.

He didn't get that luxury, he never did. Death was a fleeting companion to Salem Norongachi, it stopped by to say hello occasionally and then left, before you knew it you had almost forgotten what his face looked like. The quiet that stretched on to a horizon he couldn't see, nor cared to look at, was shattered by a presence. Its this otherworldly invader that throws a cold dash of reality onto his face; He's dying.

Panic, a natural reaction, but one that's quickly quashed. He'd been here before, he'd moved beyond, but he remained. For better or worse he was still here. Whether a conscious or some pre-programmed need Omega latched onto the invading constructs of the Force that sought to rebuild his shattered body. They entwined and danced in the space unseen, beyond atom and sub-atomic molecule, forcing them with the desperation of a dying man to the areas that would prolong his existence. It felt like years in the broken shards of his minds eye, the manic leading the blind willing to do whatever it took to keep the mangled form that contained his essence intact.

[member="Darth Mephirium"]