They made sure the locals were OK and assured them that the slavers wouldn’t be returning any time soon. In fact Sorel and her fellow Padawan managed to lock them in their own slave pens on their ships and then sent out a beacon call to alert the closest law enforcement officers to come and collect them. They gave them enough food and drink to last a week before loading up their own ship and heading for the fabled graveyard.
As they reached it, they could see small groups of scavengers working the wrecks. So Sorel travelled farther, beyond the easy finds and into the harder terrain.
The graveyard wasn't, strictly speaking, just one area but a vast expanse, and you could go for kilometres without seeing signs of anything, then crest some high dune and suddenly find yourself looking down at a field of wreckage. And every storm did more than reveal new finds, however; it had changed the terrain, reshaping the desert.
Then they came across the Crackle — one of the few constants in the desert, marked by the almost perfectly vertical spine of some massive capital ship - the Spike-half-buried in the ground. Nobody knew what kind of ship it had been, Republic, Imperial, something else from earlier; it was impossible to tell, because all that remained was the keel line, rising out of the ground, and some twisted support beams still clinging to what remained of the frame. Everything else of the ship was simply gone, taken in the explosion of plasma that had erupted on impact. The heat had been so intense it had seared the desert sand, burning so fast and hot it had turned the ground to blackened glass. Over the years, the glass had broken into smaller and smaller chunks, on its way to becoming sand once more, but when you rode or walked over the land, you'd hear it cracking, echoes that seemed to whisper for kilometres. Hence its name.
[member="Orihime Ike"]
