Private Lost in Space

[Cailen Corso]

​

Tags: Efret Farr
Location: Aboard the Prosperity

According to Prosperity's internal clock, it was still early morning by the time Cailen roused from bed and gathered his belongings. He took to the empty corridors alone, with nothing but a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and his trusty pit droid companion, D4-R1, by his side. "You, uh... you ready for this, buddy?" Cailen asked, looking down and to the side at the diminutive droid. It nodded its rotund head, the monocular lamp brightening as it squeaked an affirmative tone.

"Yeah, I know it's kinda scary, but I have to do this," Cailen said. "I don't want to miss this if it's something big." Naturally, Dart didn't need convincing. It just whirred and squeaked, happy to follow its companion anywhere he needed to go. Part of that, Cailen thought, could be attributed to Dart's damaged memory banks when he and Silas Westgard found the poor droid on the jungle world of New Cov. He thought for a while that the little droid was only tagging along out of obedience to what it perceived as its master, but Dart was quite clear on the matter - he would follow Cailen across the galaxy no matter what.

And if Cailen's gut feeling was right, that was exactly what the two of them would have to do.

The Padawan pulled a handheld holoprojector from his pocket and rolled his thumb over the activation switch. It hummed softly, emitting a conical display topped with a disclike map of the galaxy. Several blinking orbs dotted what any versed spacer would recognize as the Outer Rim Territories. Dart hummed quizzically, and Cailen nodded. "Yup. Force nexuses," the boy affirmed. Amani Serys had provided him with the location of a few that were known to the NJO during his visit to the Halls of Healing on Coruscant, a list that Cailen embellished with additional leads while he trained with the RJC.

With the Alliance expanding southward to engage the growing Sith Order, and the Dark Empire steadily reinforcing their systems in the Core, Cailen had decided that now was the time to seek out the answer for what happened to him on Tython. What part of losing Tarus Undara had damaged his natural connection to the Force. He idly rolled his cracked kyber pendant between his thumb and index finger as he pondered, barely noticing that he'd reached Prosperity's hangar bay.

"De wanna wanga, Padawan Corso," a flight technician said with a nod. He was a Quarren speaking Huttese, which Cailen knew very little of. Only enough to know that the man was addressing him in a friendly tone, really. "Good morning," Cailen returned in Basic. Luckily, the aquatic alien understood.

The flight tech had already been apprised of Cailen's journey and already made the necessary preparations for takeoff. "Chess ko, Corso. Crispo Dart." Cailen looked to the little droid and offered a low high-five. Dart slapped the boy's palm with its metallic hand and beeped. "Haha, I think we're ready!"

"U doba, nudd chaa!" he said, waving with one hand and giving flight directions with the other. Cailen waved back and wiggled into a comfortable spot. He engaged the X-wing's engines and brought the navcomputer online. His options were pretty limited considering the ongoing conflict between the RTL, GA, and Sith Order in the galactic south, so Cailen skimmed the list of potential worlds for familiar locations; Svivren seemed awfully close to Susefvi, which he knew had been hit hard in the invasion, but the presence of a Jedi enclave there gave him hope.

"Svivren enclave it is," Cailen said to himself, tapping the coordinates.

Location: Sanrafsix Corridor, Outer Rim Territories

The Sanrafsix Corridor was expected to be quiet, but not this quiet.

Reports that he'd read back on Coruscant were admittedly grim, but Cailen had also seen just as many stories about rebel cells and resurgent League forces working to restore stability to the area. But already, Cailen had passes three damaged comms buoys and even a derelict station - an entire civilian fueling depot, completely dark. "I've got a bad feeling about this, Dart," he said as the X-wing, low on fuel, passed by the silent construct. Cailen was tempted to board and check things out, see if it was an unfortunate power failure or some other technical issue, but even the station's emergency frequency was dead; no hails from the little X-wing stirred a response from station TL-GREK-19.

Darted bleeped a worried tone, but Cailen shook his head. "No, I think we've got enough fuel to reach the next station." Just enough, he thought, looking at the gauge. Luckily, it was within sublight range according to the navcomputer, but just as Cailen set to plotting his autopilot, a barrage of red lasers arced over his ship. They narrowly missed the cockpit, zipping so close that he could feel their warmth through the glassteel.

"Pirates!" Cailen gasped, seeing them zoom by, circling for another strafe. "Hang tight, buddy!" he told the droid, who already had folded itself up in the floorboard.

Cailen pushed the throttle, roaring the ship's engines to life. He spun in a lazy corkscrew to thwart the pirates' second flight, and once they paired off, Cailen turned to follow the vessel nearest him. He mashed the twin red buttons atop the yoke and returned fire. The first burst missed entirely, making the boy curse, but the second barrage hit its mark. The pirate's engine exploded in cloud of shrapnel and space dust, which Cailen flew through with a loud "Woohoo!"

But the fight wasn't over yet. The remaining pirate fighter swooped in from the rear. Cailen's monitor flashed red with an ominous warning: "LOCK-ON DETECTED."

He pulled the yoke back hard, trying to loop up and over the enemy ship, but he was too late. An ion torpedo exploded against a chunk of space junk, sending an EMP wave that struck the hull of the X-wing. The controls before him flashed erratically, then dimmed and ultimately died. Even Dart seemed affected by the blast. Cailen was adrift, unable to move or fight back. He looked frantically through the viewport for the attacker, but he couldn't see any sign of the pirate or any other starfighters. Maybe he fled, believing the X-wing to be destroyed?

Whatever the reason was, Cailen didn't want to wait to find out. It took a few moments for the ship to regain some of its systems, but the engines were fried. Luckily, the navcomputer was still somewhat usable, as well as the onboard comms relay.

Cailen patched into the only emergency channel his X-wing could detect, one that registered as RRS-01.45 - it was an old Rimward Trade League beacon, by the looks of the syntax. "SOS! I'm in need of help, please! Anyone, if you can hear this, please send help!" Cailen pleaded. He knew it was likely that there was no one left to monitor the League's network, and if there were, they likely weren't the helpful sort... but this was his last-ditch effort to get backup before the pirates -or worse- returned to finish the job.

 

[Efret Farr]

Field Camp Nu
A week prior

A line of rainbow light came first, developing slowly as an arc across one of her blind spots and into her blurry field of vision. When it was pronounced enough to notice, she set down the brush with which she had been painting nullification resin onto a Sith artifact to instead wave her hand in front of her face. It didn't obscure the light.

"Toric."

The Kessurian glanced over at her from where he stood cataloguing a shipment of artifacts, then approached the table she sat at.

"Please finish this," she said before getting up from her chair. "Thank you."

By the time she had walked the length of the research tent to its exit, pins and needles had begun to prick at one of her wrists. She used her other hand to push out one of the tent flaps and shouldered into the cool Eiattuan night. The way she stumbled part of a meter on in a few strides wasn't entirely due to the lack of guidance from Nirrah—who she had already put to bed. It was also the weight that sleep deprivation had heaped onto her muscles. She crumpled in slow motion to the ground, soft soil broken with scraggly clumps of swamp grass, and stayed there, head cradled in her hands in anticipation of a migraine, until she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Pipma was crouched at her side when she looked up. The Sith Pureblood wore a commiserative smile. "You need to sleep," she stated.

Efret gave a small, defeated shake of her head. "I do sleep."

"I mean, in your bed." Frowning, Pipma caressed a hand over the Chief Curator's forehead. Neither woman was very experienced in Force healing techniques, but they could get by. Though the energetic pulse radiating from Pipma's hand chased off both of Efret's auric symptoms, she knew they both would soon return when Pipma moved away. "Why do you not sleep in the tent?"

"Because I have nightmares almost every night. I don't want to disturb any of you."

Pipma's brow creased. "Nightmares?"

"A Dark Jedi Elite cursed me with them."

"Efret."

"They started as waking visions."

"For how long?"

"Two...months."

"Efret." The intended verbal emphasis was communicated through the other archeologist's exasperated expression. It dropped from her face as soon as it had come and she brushed her thumb over Efret's forehead again. "You need to go to a nexus."

"I tried that already," she replied truthfully, but chose not to admit that it had been the Caves of Light and Shadows on Spintir. She hadn't proved strong enough to successfully rebalance the Dark and Light inside her. It was bad enough that her failure was a secret between herself and a self-exiled Sith lord. She simply could not bear to let anyone else know yet, and not just for her own sake—for Zeren too.

"Try it again."

Efret shook her head again. "It almost killed me, Pipma."

"Then you went to the wrong one." Pipma sighed. "You're smart but don't know everything, so let me tell you this. When I first came to the Jedi, I had to purge the Dark side from myself. I had never touched it but because of my species, I'm predisposed. The masters had to go about it carefully, slowly. I know first-hand how Darkness can get its claws into you such that getting it out would rip out the Light too." Another soft and sympathetic smile stretched her lips. "Try it again?"

So much occurred to Efret in the space of a moment: empathy for the child Pipma had been; relief that finally someone seemed to understand; fear that this would never end, or that she would be irrevocably changed if it did. What if the Dark could embed itself so deeply into a person's Light that it could never be removed? What if their Light came to rely on the Dark? Would it then eventually be consumed?

She couldn't think like that, not yet. Hopefully, she wouldn't have to.

Gathering what courage she could against not physical pain, as Pipma was staving that off for now, but the mental anguish that was mounting in its stead, she nodded.

"I think the Enclave on Svivren has a nexus. You could take a detour there after helping Master Edo before coming back."

And so, that became the plan.

Sanrafsix Corridor
Now

With the governmental debate regarding the use of a clone regiment from Neo-Kamino as part of the League Defense Force concluded, Efret had took back to the spacelanes in her borrowed freighter. She just a few minutes into a jump from Kabal to Svivren before the translated binary of her astromech, Tewy, typed itself out onto the navicomputer.

// Announcement = distress signal detected
Channel = RRS-01.45 \\

The syntax felt familiar. Though Efret had never worked with the Rimward Trade League, she had taken time abroad the Dawn Chaser after the Forcers' meeting to accustom herself to a few of the emergency channels out in this part of the Outer Rim. If she was going to be travelling it, she ought know what her options were in the event of a space travel accident or attack. Over the short course of her study, she had come across both the old and new nomenclature for naming beacons.

RRS was the former.

What was someone doing using the old system?

"What are they saying?" she asked Tewy.

He repeated the transcription of Cailen's message on screen.

"SOS! I'm in need of help, please! Anyone, if you can hear this, please send help!"

"Find me a—" she begun to sign, with her vocoder interpreting, before she, and thus it stopped.

Tewy was typing again. // Possibility = trap \\

"I know, friend." Efret gave him a pat on the dome. "That's a chance we're taking. Find a safe jump trajectory we can pivot to. Preferably still in the Sanrafsix Corridor."

With an affirmative beep and blink of one of his indicator lights, Tewy found new coordinates and loaded them into the nav.

Efret reached up to the top of the cockpit and slowly flipped the hyperspace throttle. The freighter shuddered as it dropped back into realspace not too far from where the padawan's X-wing had pinged.

Cailen Corso​

 

[Cailen Corso]

​

Tags: Efret Farr
Location: Sanrafsix Corridor, Outer Rim Territories

Buttons brightened and dimmed rhythmically and the navcomputer read only null values; slowly, the X-wing's systems were coming back online, but not comprehensively enough to engage the engines or spool the hyperdrive. He was little more than a floating hunk of space junk, and if it took any longer, he might be turned into just that.

"C'mon, c'mon," the boy groaned. Cailen knew better than to mash buttons rampantly, but he was beginning to panic. He used every combination of buttons, switches, and knobs he knew of to try and force the starship to power up, to no avail. "Kriff!" he swore. A bright flash drew Cailen's attention, his eyes snapping forward to see the source: a pair of pirate headhunters dropping out of hyperspace.

Cailen patched into the distress beacon one last time, his voice frantic. "This is Cailen Corso of the NJO, I need help, now!"

As the pirates drew nearer, Cailen gripped the yoke with both hands. He squeezed it until his knuckles turned white. Either the X-wing would regain systems so he can throw the sticks forward to pull up out of their way, or he'd get blasted into bits.

 

[Efret Farr]

"I see them, Tewy," Efret assured her copilot whose indicator lights were all rapidly blinking in warning. Well, technically, Nirrah saw them out of the transparisteel viewport, but it was really all the same at present, and anytime they shared vision telepathically.

The two newly-appeared pirate fighters were flying against the grain on which Efret travelled. She hoped that the size of her freighter compared to them might be enough to give them pause. Still, she was a ways from them and their disabled prey, the X-wing that had pinged the beacon. Surely their radar screens had alerted them to her presence but perhaps they needed a little coaxing to take her seriously.

"Disable aim assist for a minute." She reached for the joystick control to the freighter's nose turret and trained the barrel far left. With a press on the trigger button, a burst of green bolts flew into the vacuum of space clear of of pirates but surely within their peripheral views.

"Try to hail them. And RRS-01.45, please."

Tewy's dome whirled around and he likewise turned his scomp link in the dataport, looking for a comm connection between the pirates to patch into. If he could, he would add Cailen to the call, and Efret would tell them all, "A Master of the New Jedi Order is claiming this shipwrecked vessel. If you do not move on, my next shot will not be a warning."

Cailen Corso​