Tess hummed a melancholy tune to herself as she tightened down one of the bolts on one of the various parameter sensors that surrounded the settlement the now-former C.I.S. remnants had decided to take shelter. She had made contact with the other survivors a day or two ago and put herself to work maintaining the sensor grid that the scouts had planted before the main group had arrived. She hadn’t been at Naboo when it fell, but she had been on Druckenwell dealing with some family business affairs when the event began. It had also been one of the rare times that she had been in the same place as her brothers, just for calamity to strike and rip them away from her. Tess was unsure if either of them had survived or not, having lost contact with them in the chaos.
A robotic whistle and beeping brought Tess back to the present as BD-404 alerted her of an overloading capacitor. She quickly flipped a series of breakers and pressed a couple of buttons to put the sensor array in low power mode for diagnostics. “Just couldn’t be a simple reset, could it?” she grumbled as she plugged in the datapad to run a diagnostics test.
BD ran over to a lizard that had crawled out from under a bush and decided to scan the unknown creature. The lizard simply stared, unblinking at the blue glow that surrounded it, flicking out its tongue once, twice, and again to taste the air around it. Not sensing any threats from the bipedal droid, it laid on its belly and drank in the warm sunlight.
Looking back to the datapad the screen showed a fuse had blown creating a short in the wiring that was causing the overcharge and beacon malfunctions. “Now that is a simple fix. Good thing I don’t have to scavenge parts to keep this operational.” Tess said to herself as she replaced the fuse and powered up the sensor array. Another quick check and everything looked operational.
She stood striking her thighs with her hands to clean some of the dust off of her pants, when she heard it, the distant sound of gunships and other aircraft taking off. She immediately turned up her commlink to see what the radio chatter indicated, and the resulting information was not a good omen. The former Crow watched the gunships advance due north-east of her current position. She quickly made her way to her speeder and pointed it northwest toward a higher elevation.
The distance was quickly traveled and Tess found a high enough rise in the landscape before disembarking and pulling out her binocs to locate the fight. It wasn’t hard to see, and once she saw it everything became muscle-memory; unloading her AMR-211 she laid down spare ammunition and went prone. She loaded a magazine and scoped the target area; mental calculations flew through her mind as she made adjustments to the sight and angle of her rifle.
“Wind…. Humidity… Temperature… Range… Target speeds… Set.” She mumbled to herself before slowly exhaling, deselecting the safety, and slowly pulling the trigger. The rifle went off with the sound of a small explosion and Tess watched as the speeder she had been aiming at disappeared in a small detonation as her round hit its mark. She wasted no time in racking another round and repeating the process, faster this time but with the same precision accuracy always taking note of ally positions.
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