Meat on the Bones

[Gryylarc]

Gryylarc woke up on a frigid mountainside to a sharp pain behind his right ear, and a human voice in the same ear. He couldn’t tell which of the three problems irritated him most.

“You’re awake,” said the voice, and when Gryylarc looked around he saw nobody. Rock, snow, and faraway desert or grassland. He probed the sore spot behind his head. His alchemized claws snagged on a bandage. He pulled back, sensibly enough.

<<You’ve implanted a transceiver with a bone-conductivity microphone.>>

“Oh, stop yowling. Or get it out of the way. Just know that I don’t understand your tongue, but I know you understand mine, so let’s begin. If you attempt to remove the module injected into your skull, it will detonate. It’s a collapsium microcore, essentially a small seismic charge. Nod if you understand me.”

He nodded, but his eyes flicked over the mountainside again, and he scanned the nearby air. A small shape flitted between crags. He raised a fist, summoned his rage-

-and woke up again, flat on the snowy rock, head pounding worse than before.

“The module includes two other features,” said the human voice. “One is a specially tuned brain scanner that notifies the module and me when you attempt to use your crude grasp of the Force. The last feature is a neurochemical interrupt, a microdose of a Ssi-Ruuvi substance comparable to coma gas. I trust the relationship between these two features is obvious?”

<<I am going to wear your scalp on my belt, human. I will roast your brain and eat it with salt.>>

“I’ll take your grunting as a yes. Now that you understand your situation, start climbing.”

For the first time, genuine confusion sank in. Nothing around looked immediately climbable -- no rock faces, no structures, certainly no large trees.

“Up, you simpleton. Up.”

Gryylarc eyed the slope uphill, which was nothing special but, come to think of it, probably a tough climb for a human. It seemed to terminate in a ridge maybe a hundred metres away. Maybe there he’d get a better view of whatever the human wanted him to do. He started walking. The alternative was either another knockout or a collapsium detonation, assuming the human was telling the truth. He wondered absently how many doses of neurological off-switch the implant could hold, and how far he could push his invisible captor’s patience before the collapsium went off.

In the meantime, apparently he had a job to do.

 

[Gryylarc]

The ridge ended and he found himself looking over a set of gigantic ruins -- not originally human, to his eye, but certainly human-renovated within the last decade or so. Thin stone bridges connected outer spires to a central tower built into a low peak. Snow packed everything, even what looked like a docking bay in the foundation. The defenses, military-grade, had seen better days and then significantly worse ones. War had come through here, maybe only weeks ago. Even the snow couldn’t hide the ozone stink of blasterfire.

“You make good time for an old Wookiee,” said the voice. “Down you go. Comb the ruins top to bottom for anything of Sith origin; it should take you around ten hours to do a thorough search. You have permission to use the Force to interact with the site and defend yourself.” A gnatlike shape, far away, bobbed up and down in the air. “Harm the monitor drones and, of course, you’ll be punished. Attempt to remove the implant and you will die, one way or another. I’ve gone to significant trouble to set this up, but I have no compunction about detonating either the implant or the entire site.”

Gryylarc snarled deep in his throat and approximated Basic. “I gnnderrstarrrnnd. Khawyyet.”

“Oh, you want quiet, do you. You understand, do you.” The human laughed hard and went silent. Gryylarc had the distinct sense that the human had just flipped a switch and stopped transmitting from...really anywhere. The human might be close, on the other side of the planet, in orbit, or significantly farther. The lack of latency in the transmission suggested minimal relays.

As Gryylarc clambered along the ridge toward the ruins, old memory came back sluggishly: life as a technician before his long stint in the under-jungle, before his recruitment to the Sith. There’d been a time when he could have rigged something similar to the device in his skull. That life was long gone; his enemy might not know about it. One way or another, Gryylarc decided not to display any technical skill, if he had any left. As hidden advantages went, it was a bit like having a rusty knife tucked under your fur. Not much, but the moment might strike.

 

[Gryylarc]

Visual evidence suggested four successive sets of occupants. The original builders had been a relatively short species. He could move through the halls easily enough, but had to duck through every door. Most humans would have done fine, and apparently had: it seemed a humanocentric crew had turned the site into a Sith temple or academy. They’d sunk in an obscene amount of money, but by Gryylarc’s estimate they hadn’t lived here long. This wasn’t a place of power, and when he found what seemed like a training room -- long repurposed for storage -- the stone walls and floors had minimal scarring. No, the Sith renovation had been abortive, an initial success that never followed through. That much seemed clear enough.

Then the First Order had turned this place into some kind of lower-priority garrison. Then the Ssi-Ruuk had wiped them out.

Of all four sets of occupants, Gryylarc found himself most aligned to the warm-blooded reptiles who’d stormed this place only weeks ago. The level of decomposition in Ssi-Ruuvi and human bodies gave him a clear timeframe, and it meshed with the Ssi-Ruuvi conquest of First Order space writ large. None of that helped him understand where he was, what planet he’d been dropped on: the First Order had been one of recent history’s larger governments at its peak. And they’d certainly supplanted their share of native species, presumably including short ones. A wild thought struck him, and he drew a deep breath -- but no, he didn’t smell Ewok fur, and Endor orbited a gas giant anyway, didn’t it. Plus Ewoks couldn’t build like this.

 

[Gryylarc]

He straightened up from examining a dead officer as big claws rasped on stone somewhere around. The damage and debris were all out of proportion to the number of bodies: clearly the Ssi-Ruuk had taken their normal approach, focused on entechable prisoners. This garrison’s defenders were batteries by now. The Ssi-Ruuk had won...and they’d left something behind.

The saurians who came into sight down the stone hallway only reached Gryylarc’s waist. Unlike the larger Ssi-Ruuk, they had brown scales: P’w’eck slave caste. They spotted him immediately.

Paddle beamers spat thin silver lines that made the air shiver and buzz. As Gryylarc jumped for cover, one brushed his right hand, and it went pins-and-needles numb immediately. From what he’d heard, if a paddle beamer shot caught his central nervous system, he’d be out as surely as if the human triggered the neural interrupt. Gryylarc plastered himself against a wall behind a scarred Sith statue. He missed his spear and lightstaff keenly.

“Underwhelming,” said the human in his head. “I was told you were a Sith marauder. So far all I’ve seen from you is subservience and fear.”

Gryylarc snarled but stayed where he was. Claws clicked on the stone floor. He stretched out to the Force and connected it to his absolutely towering rage.

Then he stepped out of cover and, as silver beams converged toward him, he roared. He threw out a hand. The Force rebounded along the hallway, an echoing shockwave that threw the P’w’ecks off their feet despite the balance that their long tails afforded. He heard bones snap, not from any transcendent power on his part but because anyone could break a leg if they fell wrong. And he was making sure they fell very wrong indeed.

The paddle beamers stopped being a threat in short order. As the echoes of the Force push died down. Gryylarc sagged against the nearest wall. Two hundred and fifty years threatened to catch up with him every once in a while. But if he didn’t capitalize on the moment, they’d just get up and regroup and so forth.

A half-melted First Order blaster rifle drifted to his one good hand. His alchemized claws sank into the barrel and made it the handle of an improvised club. The P’w’eck were scrambling upright and he scrambled after them, more of a charge once he found his balance and got some momentum going. The blaster’s grip and stock thudded into brown scales and cracked the bones underneath. Claws scraped at him but couldn’t do much real damage through his heavy gray fur. When the blaster broke, he found himself swinging a dying P’w’eck soldier by its forearm as a secondary club. When that didn’t last, he turned to his claws.


Down the hall behind him, a small repulsor whined. He glanced back and saw a camera drone watching. He snarled wordlessly, rubbing his numb hand.

“Back to work, Wookiee,” said the human in his skull. “You haven’t found anything yet.”

 

[Gryylarc]

Sundown left the ruins dark. Anyone who would have preferred light was either dead or elsewhere. After long years in the Kashyyyk Underdark, the lowest level of the forest, Gryylarc found himself at ease. This might be alien stone on a nameless world, but at a guess, night would serve him better than it did the P'w'eck troops. As he moved from room to room, he scraped a legbone into a reasonably tough spike. The noise wasn't much of a risk, not after all the sounds of combat. If someone was coming, they were already coming.

Nightfall changed one more thing about the situation. He'd seen the occasional camera drone, but now they stayed closer, in line of sight. That implied interesting things about the kinds of sensors or cameras it carried. For one, it meant low light could offer the chance to play games at the edges of the drones' line of sight. If this place really did hold Sith artifacts, or if the P'w'ecks' Ssi-Ruuvi officers had anything special, he might find options. The implant's Force-use monitor, if it existed, meant he might have to disguise any dark side trickery as something else, something the human would find legitimate.

Too much planning that relied on too many hypotheticals. Speculation wouldn't get him out of this, not unless he could find more to work with.

"You're moving aimlessly," the human said through the skull transmitter. "You'll be more efficient in a pattern. I don't want to guide you room by room."

That said a lot about the human's preconceptions, experience, and priorities. Because no salvager, no treasure hunter, would use the word 'efficiency' to describe a systematic sweep of supply closets and long-abandoned Sith acolyte bunks, with P'w'eck interference liable to show up anytime. No, the human was a bureaucrat, a detail man. The kind of man who would appreciate a sophisticated neural implant with chemical, explosive, communicative, and neurological sensor functions. Leftover First Order, through and through.

But regardless, the human had a bomb in Gryylarc's head, so his nitpicky plan was the order of the day. Gryylarc and his bone spike started turning out supply closets one locker at a time.

 

[Gryylarc]

He found the hidden door around midnight, after searching innumerable worthless little rooms. The door took the form of an ornate statue at a three-way intersection, by a window that looked out over the dark mountainside. Examining the statue's uniqueness meant standing in front of that panoramic window with a glowrod - not a healthy move if the P'w'ecks had a presence within lline of sight.

"The Force led you to this, didn't it," said the human through the skull implant. "Your brain functions deviated when you first looked at it." Gryylarc winced as the voice buzzed through the surgical site. Rather than attempt to answer, he toggled the statue's hidden catch again, and five hundred pounds of polished stone slid gracefully aside. Far down a hall, he could hear claws running on rock: more P'w'eck troops on their way, presumably, unless these Sith had left tuk'ata around or some such. He slid into the pit beneath the statue and ran his claws over the walls until they snagged on another catch. The statue moved back into place, leaving Gryylarc and his glowrod entombed.

He'd rather hoped that this place would turn out to be a tunnel and that the rock would block the transmission. He was disappointed on both counts. The pit was just that: it slanted down into a near-vertical shaft that stank. Maybe it used to be a secret passage, but those days were long gone. Or maybe the whole thing had been meant as a trap for unwise acolytes. You never could tell with Sith.

With the human's voice nitpicking in his head, he sank his alchemical claws into the mountain's bedrock and began climbing down. There was a draft, so there had to be some kind of a breach or side passage, eventually. On the plus side, when he drew on the Force for strength and endurance, the human didn't raise a fuss.

And since climbing was beyond second nature to Gryylarc, he spent a portion of his Force attention feeling out the implant. How deep it went, how large it was, whether he had a prayer of ripping it from his skull before the collapsium went off.

 

[Gryylarc]

The farther down the shaft he went, the stronger the draft and the more it stank. By the time he reached the bottom, he had a pretty good idea of what he would find.

"Tell me what you see," said the human's voice. Gryylarc glanced up, and realized that since no camera drone could have come down with him, the human no longer had line of sight. The old Wookiee growled and forced his mouth to take unpleasant shapes.

"Sspyyykess. Drreed Syyyth."

"Dread?"

"Deddd," Gryylarc snarled. "Khorrrrpsss."

"Don't hurt yourself," the human sneered, chuckling. "So a dead Sith impaled on spikes. At the bottom of the tunnel, presumably? Where does it go?"

Gryylarc crouched by the source of the draft, a small breach, very neat and tidy. The desiccated Sith's lightsaber had punched that hole, presumably in defiance of death. Gryylarc jammed his bone spike into the gap to clear out spiderwebs and similar gunk, then got his face level with the floor -- right by the dead man's shoulder -- and put his eye to the hole. He saw exactly nothing.

The lightsaber, however, gave him a little more to work with. He stared into the blood-red blade, examined the diatium power cell -- half-full -- and turned the weapon off again.

"So you're armed," the human said. "Carve yourself free of whatever mess you're in and get back to work. You've secured exactly nothing. Find out where this tunnel goes, and do it quickly and carefully."

Gryylarc's mouth twisted. He rifled the dead Sith's pockets, boots, and belt pouches. A few odds and ends found their way into his fur and bandolier, things that the human's camera drones couldn't see. Nothing game-changing, but maybe enough to tilt the scales later. The Sith had been wearing a ring, too small for Gryylarc's pinkie finger; he kept that to offer the human, just in case he needed to bargain.

Or extend the human's patience, for that matter.

 

[Gryylarc]

The bottom of the pit exhausted its riches in moments. Gryylarc scratched his chin -- carefully; Moran's alchemy had made his claws sharper, not just stronger -- and raised the glowrod high. A secret door wouldn't lead solely to a trap; more likely, both served as gatekeeping mechanisms for something valuable. Backdoor escape route, maybe, but there were better scenarios. Presumably the human wouldn't have gone to this trouble unless those better scenarios were viable. Founded, even. A decent translator droid might have helped; he'd used those before, like many Wookiees did if they wanted to participate in galactic civilization. Maybe he needed a new one.

The glowrod offered no direction. He growled deep in his throat and listened to the Force.

“Careful, Wookiee. Remember the collapsium charge isn't solely under my control. If you use the Force to damage or remove the implant, I guarantee it'll detonate faster than you can get clear.”

<<That risk sounds more acceptable by the minute,>> Gryylarc said, knowing that the human couldn't understand him - or at least that was the claim. The implant suggested attention to detail and access to resources. A translator had to be involved somewhere.

“Less chatter, more work,” said the human. “Linger any longer outside my line of sight and I'll have to assume it's intentional.”

It rankled to let the human have the last word. Gryylarc satiated himself by digging deep, picking a direction by intuition, and hacking away at the stone. The lightsaber cut well, better than his own lightstaff. The Sith here, no matter their fate, had known their business. Huge chunks of stone with glowing edges crushed the spikes and the corpse. With the human's laughter in his head, Gryylarc carved out a pit in the wall. It proved to be about as thick as his forearm was long. The top fell away as he blindly sheared off the bottom of a hidden door. A Sith leap took him over the hot stone. Shaggy fur smoked from a close call or two. Within moments, though, he straightened up in a dark room made of bedrock. The lightsaber cast a beautiful red glow, just enough to see the room and what it held.

 

[Gryylarc]

“What do you see?”

<<Nothing yet, you worthless->> Gryylarc turned the air blue in Shyriiwook.

“Words, Wookiee. Use your words.” So the human wanted to keep his translator a secret then, unless he somehow didn't have one. So be it: Gryylarc could keep a secret too.

Such as, for example, the large holocron sitting on a plinth of warped bone right in front of him.

“Sree gnusthhingh.”

“Well keep moving. You should be getting close.”

Gryylarc looked around the rest of the room in the saber's light. Nothing. This was the end of the line, the treasure, the thing that would either set him free or get him disposed of. And nobody was stupid enough to make an enemy of a Sith marauder this way and let them go. No, for all Gryylarc's lack of a plan, he needed to find a way forward. Now.

He stepped up to the plinth and reached for the holocron, but froze. A strong impression filled him, a near-future vision, just the sense of a voice and a deadly buzz in his head. He pulled back his hand. The implant's audio pickup would register the voice of the holocron's gatekeeper if the holocron responded to his touch. Clearly that would lead to the human pushing the kill switch: disposal achieved, relic located, operation successful, Wookiee decapitated.

The impression told Gryylarc two more things, both useful. One, the microcharge likely wasn't strong enough to risk damaging a holocron within arm's reach.

And two, if he was about to die, he really could see the future. Not in any detail, but still.

He turned off the lightsaber, then put its warm emitter along the side of his skull and let his finger rest on the activator. Collapsium was a strange explosive. It might well just dissolve into a lightsaber's blade -- but no, he got the same sense of 'boom.’ Disappointment and real fear chewed at his gut. Fear, however, led to anger and plenty of it.

He rested his alchemical claws around the surgical site gingerly. Those claws could dig into stone; his skull and the implant wouldn't offer much resistance. Could he rip the implant free and get clear?

Nothing said yes, but nothing said no. He snarled wordlessly and listened harder. Nothing, no trace of instinct.

His claw tips poked through bandages and closed on metal. With one motion, he let out a sharp breath, ripped the implant loose, and threw it through the hole into the vertical shaft.

All sound disappeared. Then the bloody little thing exploded. It hadn't even touched ground when it did a miniature impression of a seismic charge. A wave of glowing blue hammered the walls and rippled through the aperture he'd cut. It tore into his chest and shattered the bone plinth behind him. He spun and caught the crystal holocron as he fell.

The air shifted, pressure rising sharply, as the vertical shaft began to collapse. By the sound of it, the bulk of the collapsium detonation was rebounding all the way up to the statue's secret door. So much for his guess about the charger's blast radius. Maybe the human had wanted to destroy the holocron, not claim it. Maybe he would have just given a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the holocron.

Not helpful things to consider while a mountain buried you alive. But on the other hand, as the shaft collapsed and sealed Gryylarc in the damaged vault beneath who knew how many tons of mountain bedrock, he admitted distraction had its benefits.

 

[Gryylarc]

Stone dust threatened to choke him. In the end he practiced breath control and sat still to minimize his needs until the dust settled from the air. The lightsaber stayed off, mostly because he didn't trust its blade not to eat all the oxygen in the crypt, but the stone he'd cut only minutes ago gave off enough of a glow to stay oriented. His glowrod and most of the Sith corpse's gear refused to respond, and his claws found cracks in their housings. In the collapsium detonation, and the subsequent thrown-around-ness of his huge body, just about everything that could break had broken except the lightsaber.

And, thankfully, the holocron. How a thing like that could stay intact in all the chaos, he didn't know. But it had lasted this long, hadn't it. When its gatekeeper flickered to life, a little red shape half the size of his forearm, the holo display fuzzed and warped in a liquid way. The Elder had shown him a holocron once, but that had been a more modern thing. This felt deeply old, both to his hands and to his instincts.

The gatekeeper looked human or close enough, though under those robes it could have been three Jawas standing on each other's shoulders.

<<Who are you?>> said Gryylarc. "Huuuh rrrrryy-"

The little shape looked around, took in the situation, laughed, and vanished. The contempt stung. Gryylarc refrained from smashing the holocron against the wall. These were all problems for another time. Right now he had to find or make a way out. Action could get him crushed; inaction would see him suffocate or starve. He thought of reaching out to the Elder as he'd been taught, but the Elder was very far away. No, if he wanted to get out of here, that was entirely on him.

 

[Gryylarc]

Considering the short and ancient aliens had dug this place into the deepest levels of a solid mountain, any wall could be a handspan thick or be just solid rock for dozens of metres. Once his heart slowed down and his anger found a focal point, Gryylarc pointed the lightsaber hilt at the nearest wall. The Force didn't whisper of any impending collapse, so he triggered the saber and punched its blade deep into the stone. Then he deactivated it. No light, no draft.

He did the same on each wall, the ceiling, and the floor with similar results: at least a metre of solid rock surrounded the crypt in all directions. The Force, the Elder would have reminded him, was infinite, but his potential to use it was not. Bursting out of the mountain would have been a feat and then some. Frankly he doubted even the Elder could do that.

But that didn't mean brute strength was useless, did it. He hefted the lightsaber and eyed the ceiling.

He'd been facing away from the window when he moved the statue that sealed the shaft. Then he'd turned around, gone down a short slope that fell away into the vertical part of the shaft. Then he'd climbed down -- when had he turned, and how far? If memory served, the crypt's hidden door at the bottom of the shaft had been on the wall closest to the mountainside. That would mean it lined up with the entry to the shaft: the path might drop rapidly and have its kinks, but it didn't require turning. It required certainty.

The lightsaber snap-hissed to life. He began chopping into the wall opposite the collapsed shaft. Huge slices and chunks of stone tumbled away around his feet or slammed against his shins, but he kept moving.

Soon the whole wall glowed with ragged stone, the air was thick with burnt stone particulates, he barely had anywhere to stand-

But this time when he stabbed the saber into the wall, he felt a draft.

 

[Gryylarc]

Glowing rock trapezoids tumbled down the mountain. Gryylarc hopped gracelessly over the rough threshold of red-hot stone. His feet sank into snow. Slush, really, half-melted by the radiant heat of the door he'd just carved in the mountainside. He spat stone dust and filled his lungs with cold hard air. The Ssi-Ruuk and their P'w'eck slave soldiers could probably see him and his newly-claimed lightsaber and all this red stone; so could the human's camera drones, at a guess. He found he didn't care about either, not in the slightest.

<<Let them come,>> he snarled under his breath. He tossed the holocron up, snagged it out of the air, and headed uphill. The Ssi-Ruuk had arrived somehow. They or their slaves would fly him offworld, or they would die at a Sith's hands. That felt like a proper degree of vainglory, but mostly it came down to anger. Because he was unutterably tired of being careful about this kind of thing. He touched the gaping wound in his skull; it felt warm, not a good sign. An infection might set in sooner rather than later. Between that and the minor wounds he'd picked up today, he'd need to book some time with one of the Elder's medical droids.

Until then, what mattered was the fever starting to boil his blood, and making sure it didn't break his judgment. Because things were going to get about as wild as possible, and rampaging while borderline delirious was no recipe for success.

He clambered up over a stone ledge and found himself staring down a very large green saurian with a very large alien gun. Then all of the above questions became academic.