On the Raggedy Edge

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The blind jump ended with a crash that tore through the inertial dampeners. The [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Corridor Sweeper[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]’s cockpit became a series of oppressive forces that slammed against Mara from all directions without rhythm. As if the bulkheads, the chairs, the odds and ends were the blaster shots that had rained down on her outside a Rebel starport on Lameredd. Before much of the pain registered, before the motion ended, something inside her knew she would never trust this ship again, no matter how long she’d owned it. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Artificial gravity went out and she’d busted a strap. She floated broken in the remaining restraints, bobbing as jets of venting fluids tweaked the wreck this way or that and obscured the spiderwebbed viewport with colorful snow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]There had been no warning from her instincts. Astrogation was her primary skill, she was Jorus Merrill’s daughter, she was a Warden of the Sky, and yet she’d struck the mass shadow and accompanying mass without so much as a twinge of unease. That, as much as the physical jolt and the cracked bones, explained the shock that muddied her thoughts. Her right hand refused to respond. With her left, she unstrapped and fished the Ankarres Sapphire from inside her flight suit. Warmth suffused her, swelled as she focused, and the pain began to fade but not nearly fast enough.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Corridor Sweeper[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] had acquired a spin of a few degrees per second, comprising pitch, yaw, and roll elements relative to the little ship’s main axes. Mara found herself drifting slowly from the chair, up over the console. Her control yoke caught her legs and spun her around; her back thumped against the viewport. The ship’s lights flickered and died. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She held her breath and listened. One hiss -- no, two. Two atmospheric leaks. Some of that snow was moisture from the ship’s air. After that long-ago accident with Kaili Talith, she’d added extra air tanks to the [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Sweeper[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px], but even augmented atmosphere would run out if those leaks didn’t get plugged. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]And then, of course, there was the problem of what she’d run into.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She clasped her hands together and painful sensation returned to the right. She’d banged it on something, or wrenched the wrist terribly, but the Sapphire was mending it even if she couldn’t focus. Once her thoughts began to clear, she wrapped the gemstone’s silver chain around her right wrist and pushed off from the dead console to float through the cabin door.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She found the leaks with a shaken can of DragonsFlame, foamy orbs slurping out through the puncture wounds to snow blonde. An emergency pack yielded pain meds and a small patch kit. One-handed, she pressed the flexible plastic discs against the irregular rents in the hull, then glued them down with the hotgun. She did the whole thing automatically, sluggish. With the cabin controls down, she realized after a long silence, she would need to turn on the backup air manually. It was an analog system; you could activate it electronically, but fundamentally it was just a clever pressure gauge and a couple of oblong bottles under a deck plate. With gravity off, she found herself treating the plate as a wall. Bits of dirt were floating free of the gaps in the deck; she inhaled some of it and coughed until her ribs screamed. They got the Sapphire’s attention.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]One-handed, she managed to unlatch the smuggling compartment in the deck and reveal the backup air. A twist, a hiss, and that was that. She was no longer doomed -- at least, not to asphyxiation. With a grimace, she shifted the Ankarres Sapphire to her ribs, tucking it under the band of her athletic bra. That took some doing, as the pain was on her left side and her right hand refused to cooperate. [/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Between better air and a slowing heart, and possibly the Sapphire if she’d hit her head, clarity returned piece by piece. [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]All right, you’ve handled the air[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px], her mother’s voice seemed to say. [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]What comes next?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“Reactor,” she mumbled. The [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Sweeper[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] was a small ship, Tachyon-class. It didn’t take much to squirm through the dented back hall, Sapphire clutched in her right hand. Her radiation deflection badge beeped once: minor hazard. The badge would keep her safe for a little while, long enough to check the problem. She’d rebuilt this reactor from scratch, twice; she knew its sounds and its moods. It wasn’t happy, but it’d work with only minor tweaking. She sensed that much even before she checked the manifolds. With a grimace, she shut it down pending further investigation and filled the compartment with radiation dampening foam.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Air, reactor, check what’s outside.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She grunted an acknowledgement of the remembered instructions and floated back through the access shaft, the cargo hold, the small living quarters and the cockpit hatch.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Multicolored snow skittered and piled up on the outside of the cracked viewport. Hydraulic fluid, hyperdrive coolant, water vapor, graywater slush, and a dozen other fluids. The [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Corridor Sweeper [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]was hurt and hurt bad. Projected motion was at the heart of Warden tactics; she called on the Force gingerly and ran her hand along the transparisteel. The snow poofed away, clearing her view. She bit back an oath.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The creature was massive, encrusted with space-barnacles and a shell of dust. How long it had been here she couldn’t say. Raised on Chloe Blake’s stories, she knew the Oswaft for what it was, but Oswaft left behind their casings and detritus when they stepped through hyperspace. This one, massive as a command ship, had been here long enough for its minimal gravity to pull in space dust. She’d struck one massive wing and rebounded. A spray of dust had broken the Oswaft’s negligible escape velocity, revealing a withered gray surface. The curve of a wing that could shelter a cruiser. They didn’t grow this big, not often. Ancient, then. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Despite her leftover pain and a serious chill, she ached to turn the reactor back on and run a spectroscopic analysis of the detritus. Oswaft were living molecular furnaces; they could extrude diamonds if they wanted to. And thus, such things had no value for them. And thus, they kept to the ThonBoka, the Starcave Nebula.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]What madness had taken this one, that it had come out here, into the grip of the hyperspace disturbance at the edge of the galaxy? There was another species that knew how to make hyperjumps, the Duinuogwuin, but the Star Dragons had a much longer range than the Oswaft by all accounts. Oswaft were very precise at very short ranges, in familiar territory. Duinuogwuin were wanderers. One might come out here, if it knew about the secret Brodo Asogan breach point. An Oswaft would stop and go home and never get within ten thousand light-years of this place.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]What she’d taken for tiny skin protrusions or barnacles were, she realized, things much like her. Small ships and space junk, snared out of hyperspace by the Oswaft’s mass shadow. She stabilized herself against the viewport, staring, taking in the immensity of it. Nimble as a microjump, big as a dreadnought. Mara shivered. Her hand was feeling better, and her ribs. Time to seal off all those fluid leaks if she could. Later she could clear away part of the dampening foam, tweak the reactor, and do a full diagnostic on herself and the corpse outside. And corpse it was: one or two impacts had punched through the gray skin, revealing dry, delicate structures.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]After closing off what valves she could access without power tools, she got to work on the reactor. Once partial power was restored, she donned a suit, cycled the airlock, and went outside to check the damage.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The Tachyon-class light freighter was a workmanlike starter ship, simplified in many ways, and it’d served her well as she grew up. Her dad had been one of the designers, and he’d been so proud of this ship, mainly because it was cheap enough for nearly anyone on an outer rim budget, but good quality and easy to modify. Stress had buckled plates all over the hull as decanting had sent the ship tumbling across the Oswaft’s flank. A lesser ship would have come apart around her with an impact like that. Magbooted to the warped plates, she watched the starscape. Here at the edge of the ‘verse -- [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]so much for my first solo exgal [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]-- she had a stunning view of the galactic spiral. Its milky light reflected off metal protruding from the immense cadaver. Off another way, the smaller oblong of the Rishi Maze cast a second, vaguer light that complicated the shadows of the Oswaft’s curled manta-wings. So many stars, more zeroes than she could internalize. So many things to see and be and do, and yet the Oswaft had wanted to come out here. Out where so few had come before. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]A new light cast a third shadow, fainter by far, and she turned to see its source. Something blue gleamed on one of the crashed vessels. Blue of a kind that took her breath away. It flickered as if alive, too far to see details. She marked its position in her mind and finished slapping patches on the breached, snow-crusted pipes, careful not to snag her suit on ruptured plating. Then, and only then, did she release her magboots and kick away from the [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Corridor Sweeper[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] toward the glow.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She’d gauged her course by instinct, and this time it didn’t forsake her. Rather than an infinite fall -- and she did have a little maneuvering gun, plus some skill in telekinesis -- she turned and met the other wreck boots-first. It was new, she realized. New and sleek, its engines cold but not by much. Kuat Drive Yards Blackbird-class stealth fighter-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Her breath caught in her throat, somewhere between awe, fear, and intimations of excitement. Impossible. The odds…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The ship had a fiberplast hull; her magboots didn’t work well on it, so she maneuvered around it by hand in the near-zero gee. From the vector, and the minimal rotational velocity of the Oswaft minus her own impact’s contribution, the Blackbird had been coming from the direction of the galaxy. Exiting, not entering. Even before she came around to the ripped-open cockpit and instrumentation panel, she knew what she would find. The wreckage of a pilot droid, a comm suite completely removed, a much smaller and more specialized hardlinked quantum ansible comm, and a box of golden resin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The resin alone should have kept anything like this from happening, even if she’d known what it contained. Even if she’d set out to intercept something of this kind. High-grade nullification resin obscured the box’s contents -- and, indeed, most of the ship -- from deliberate farsight and tracking and so forth. From the Force itself, or that had been the idea. If she’d come at this intentionally, it would have foiled her. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The blue glow reappeared: a spark, a nimbus dancing around the box. As she pulled it free of the wreck, the glow swelled. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]And kept swelling.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]At the edge of the galaxy, Mara floated by a dead Oswaft and a dead starship, a resin-coated holocron in her hands, and stared up at the face of life and death.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The Oswaft’s spirit was enormous, a Force ghost that could have swallowed Star Destroyers. Its wings fluttered slowly as if in an ocean current. It was oriented toward her, but had no recognizable face. It occluded half the galaxy from where she looked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“You brought me here.” She didn’t turn on her helmet comm, trusting her empathic senses to convey the message.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]No, small one.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“Then what?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The height of foolishness, to think a little matter could conceal a thing of such significance.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“It...works well enough.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Against the preconceptions and limitations of mortals, small one. I sense the way the currents bend around it, washing it toward hospitable shores. I am part of those currents, but not fully, and I cannot perceive it directly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She looked away from the spirit, down at the resin box. “I know this one.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]It knows you. You played with it as a girl, when it dwelt in a...meal box beneath a...pilot seat on a ...wandering flyer.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The old lunchbox. “Gypsymoth.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Indeed.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“Why should the will of the Force care so much about a thing like this? It’s crystal and holoprojectors, a data storage device full of folktales and songs.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Do not discount the songs. Tionne Solusar was among the great souls of her generation. She, more than most who came before, understood that all truth is of worth, regardless of its source. She was the new shoot growing from ruined ground.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“The Jedi Purge.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The time before it. Stagnation, growth gone wild and fruit gone sour. I may not have seen the life of plants on the surface of the specks called worlds, but I know enough to make the comparison. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“This isn’t...for me, is it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]No. It is for all. Its stewardship lies with Stalks-in-the-Void.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]“Jacen Voidstalker.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Indeed. And but for this accident, if accident it was, his custodianship would have been sufficient. I am only partially of the current; I cannot say for sure.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She looked down. “Am I supposed to bring it back to the galaxy?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]The lifeless pilot is not functional, nor is the vessel. Take the holocron back and it will be sent out again. Never to be touched, but available to the ears of all. In this, at least, your father showed a glimmer of wisdom. Tell him the Five send their regards.[/SIZE]

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Once the spirit was gone and her heart stopped hammering, Mara brought the resin box and quantum comm setup inside the [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Corridor Sweeper[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]. The machinery was expensive but conceptually simple: tiny spin-linked ansibles connected a simple two-way microphone to every Library Card headset in the ‘verse, along with the control modules that each Jedi faction held. She engaged the artificial gravity and set the whole thing down on her dejarik table. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]One of the comms crackled to life, audio only like all the rest. A voice, maybe a Padawan on Voss or a Master on Sullust, nobody she knew. The holocron’s gatekeeper appeared, a large-eyed woman in a flowing dress, carrying a lute. There was nobody to see it but Mara. She stayed quiet as the image of Tionne answered a question, then another, about the time of the New Jedi Order. After a while, she went to compose a message.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]-Master [member="Jacen Voidstalker"][/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Encountered a crippled Blackbird outbound at the galactic border. Contained Tionne Solusar’s holocron. Library Card setup remains functional, holocron is undamaged, but the Blackbird and its pilot droid are scrap. Returning the holocron to Sullust, for installation into a new stealth ship. So far as I can tell, there’s been no interruption in the holocron’s availability to the Library Card network.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]She’s all yours.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14.6667px]Mara Merrill[/SIZE]