Chapter One: Training Day
The frantic drumming of flight boots on hard durasteel pavement echoed down the long corridor separating the dormitories from the launch hangar. Along with the rapid and labored breaths of a single pre-teen girl, the heavy footsteps were the only thing to be heard in the vacant hall.
She'd be chastised for her tardiness, surely, but it would be far worse if she'd not shown up at all. Today was to be her first time making an actual, real-life, non-simulated, hyper-space jump, and missing such a lesson would be detrimental to her future at the academy. The shame it would bring on her family…she couldn't bear to think about it. She was the first to be accepted into the academy from her long line of ancestry; if she failed it would be generations before another of her clan might be accepted again.
The bright orange flight suit contrasted sharply with her pale blue skin. She was much lighter than the average Chiss, most likely a result of a long-dead ancestor having joined with a human -- another of the reasons that her family was so hard-pressed for favors in the military-driven Chiss Society. Her flight goggles bobbed up and down around her neck, while wisps of elegant blue hair swirled around her ears and occasionally caught in her lips. Beneath the goggles and her flight-suit, nestled tightly against her breast, she could feel the cool sapphire stone her mother had entrusted her with when she'd shipped off to the academy nearly two years prior.
It was the only thing she had left of her mother, who'd been killed within a month of her daughter's departure. She still didn't know the details of her mother's demise, only that she no longer numbered among the living. It was her steadfast dedication to her mother, and her family name, that drove her through her rigorous training, even if she had the momentary lapses like the one she was now experiencing.
Although she'd be telling the truth if she blamed her tardiness on the fact that she'd spent the entire night studying for their hyperspace test today, the young Chiss knew it would be of no consequence -- there were no excuses in the Chiss Ascendancy.
She rounded the final corner in a full sprint and burst through the swinging doors into the massive hangar a full ninety seconds late. Quickly scurrying over to the group of eleven students already receiving their instructions, she breathed a sigh of relief that they'd at least not already lifted off.
"…and the coordinates will be sent to you as soon as we leave atmosphere. You will plot them in your nav and go through the proper calculations, and on my count everyone will make the jump together. When we are all at our destination, each of you will plot your own course back to base, I will not be assisting you. There is very real danger in this exercise, and no rescue team will be sent to those of you who cannot correctly plot your jump. Is this understood?"
"Yes sir!" All twelve aspiring soldiers responded, eleven male voices joined by the one female, all in perfect military posture, with arms held straight down at their sides, backs rigid and straight.
"Very well. We lift off in exactly ten minutes. Good luck."
All of the students saluted, then broke apart to fire up their engines and prepare for their test.
"Ensign Clar'saw'nadu." The commander said, and the ensign spun around instinctively.
"Sir."
"You will have one week of kitchen clean-up duty after this exercise…should you return from it. Dismissed."
"Sir."
She saluted and spun around, grateful that her species did not show blush when it rose to their cheeks, due to their complexion. As she wove in and out of her comrades Class IV Claw Ships she swore her own laziness. She'd just picked up dishwashing duty for a paltry extra ninety seconds of sleep. Pathetic.
She scampered up the ladder and into the cockpit of her training claw, firing up the engines almost before the cockpit had completely closed shut above her. She ran a quick maintenance check, both engines were green, shields at 100, internal compensator adjusted appropriately, nav-computer up-and-running, everything checked out.
"Chiss Twelve, ready for launch." She announced, a few full seconds after the rest of her squadron had relayed their own readiness. She hated the generic call name of Chiss, but even more so her designation as number twelve. It was reserved for the worst pilot in the squadron, and while she wished she could say the ranking was due to gender discrimination, internally she knew she truly was the worst pilot of her class. Thankfully, her skills laid elsewhere, most notably in the area of martial combat.
But she had no time to think about that now, as she fired up her ion thrusters to twenty percent -- the standard for hangar takeoff -- and slowly lulled her fighter to the edge of the hangar, waiting her turn.
"Ten, away!"
"Eleven, away!"
"Twelve, away!"
She fired her thrusters up to fifty percent and blazed away from the cliff-side hangar and towards the planet's light atmosphere and the stars beyond. As she checked her diagnostics board and sensor readings for any activity -- a mindless reflex scored into her brain from hours and hours of pre-flight and in-flight drills -- her com crackled on a low frequency that she new to be a private channel.
"You ready for this Sawn?" Whispered Chiss One, far-and-away the most accomplished and prestigious of all the trainees, and the closest thing Sawn -- that was her core name, reserved for friends, family, and subordinates -- had to a friend in the squadron.
"As ready as I'll ever be Rock." She answered, calling him by nickname, a dumb play-on-words of his real name that she'd come up with when they first met, but it'd stuck through their training so that it was the only name she knew him by anymore.
"Cut the chatter Chiss," Came the voice of Chiss Leader, apparently he had the ability to pick up all private channels between the fighters as well. Sawn's cheeks burned again. "We'll be in space in approximately thirty seconds, then you will receive your coordinates and we'll be on our way."
"Acknowledged leader," Replied twelve voices in unison, with military precision. Sawn hated the forced formality she had to speak each sentence in when addressing her superiors, but such was the life of an operative in the Chiss Ascendancy.
Finally entering the zero-gravity of space, Sawn eased her thrusters to ninety percent and readied for her coordinates. A moment later they flitted to life on her screen, and she dutifully copied the numbers onto her keyboard and sent them to the nav, readying it for launch. They were still about three minute's time from the base planet's gravitational pull, so they'd be unable to jump until free of the natural gravity wells that disabled hyperspace travel.
She noticed her hands shaking on the yoke of her fighter, and fought to calm them. Taking a deep, relaxing breath, she willed herself to calm down, trying to imagine this as just another simulation. Although she was only nine years old, she wasn't stupid. She was in a heavily modified claw craft with no weapons and minimal shielding, as well as being only 4/5 the size of a normal fighter. The factory cost of this model was very low, due to its chief training purposes, and therefore, expendable. Her commanding officer wasn't lying when he said no rescue would be sent for lost pilots. If they could not successfully plot a hyperspace jump, then they weren't worthy of the Ascendancy.
In a standard class of twelve, only ten usually lived to see graduation, or at least that is what Sawn had heard. This might seem harsh and immoral to many -- if not all -- other cultures, but that is why the Ascendancy was the ultimate power in the region, only the best of the best made it to active duty.
Finally they were past the planet's natural gravity, and Sawn pressed the 'execute' button, leaning back and watching the stars stretch and then disappear into the nothingness of hyperspace. She sighed. Now she was in dead comm silence for who knows how long; patience was part of the exercise.
She spent the first hour of the flight plotting and replotting dozens of complicated and random hyperspace routes between all kinds of different planets within Chiss space. When she'd bored of that, she spent the next two hours watching a holovid about a martial arts expert -- if her superiors ever discovered she'd programmed a holovid player into her nav unit, she'd be expelled for sure. It wasn't a difficult process, and she knew firsthand that at least two or three of the other students had done the same, and heard rumors that even some of the top tier dogfighters in the galaxy allowed themselves this small luxury as well. When the credits rolled on the holovid, Sawn glanced at her chrono; she'd been in flight for nearly three and a half standard hours. Groaning, she laid back in her cramped cockpit and tried to get a catnap, knowing the claw craft's computer would wake her when they dropped from hyperspace.
Unsettled and uncomfortable at first, Sawn slowly managed to control her breathing, slowing it down to the edge of consciousness, and she felt nearly asleep, although still aware of her surroundings. It was a strange feeling, and in the twenty or so minutes she enveloped herself in it she wondered if all pilots were capable of this semi-awareness state of mind.
But before she could decide on an answer for herself her computer whizzed and beeped, and the star lines shrank and faded until she was once again in normal space…and completely alone!
Not a single claw craft was to be seen from any of her viewports, and the serene feeling she'd just experienced was replaced by a sudden and terrifying panic. She must have programmed her course wrong! She was in the middle of nowhere! Frantically she started smashing buttons on her keyboard, retconning the sequence of digits her computer had received from the commander as opposed to those she'd put in the nav. She went over the numbers a dozen times, and they checked out every time. She hadn't made a mistake, but then why was she floating here so far away from anything she knew?
"Chiss Leader, this is Chiss Twelve. Do you copy?" She asked over an open channel, furtively hoping she'd somehow just managed to emerge on the opposite side of the planet the squadron had gone to.
The empty air and static response chilled her to the bone. Was she going to die out here? She switched her frequency to pick up all signals coming from the planet, only to discover that it had none emanating from it -- it'd been long abandoned.
Checking her fuel, Sawn uttered a muffled curse in Minnisiat, a common trade language in Chiss space, knowing that she had only an hour or so before her tank passed half-empty, and after that making it back to base would be all but an impossibility.
Strangely, the fear that had enveloped her so suddenly had left Sawn just as quickly. Taking a deep breath, controlling her nerves, she got to work, the first order of business was to discover her location. She plugged her exact coordinates into her star chart, and her face fell at the result.
Unknown Space. Coordinates do not compute.
That was bad; she must be outside of Chiss space. Maybe something really had gone wrong? But she didn't have time to think about it, she needed to act! She searched the region for any signs of hyperspace lanes or airwaves carrying messages or signals, all to no avail; the planet was seemingly cut off from all society.
When she glanced at the planet again, a cool chill ran down her spine…she could almost…feel the darkness in that place, as if it was home to monsters and villains. This thought gave her a sudden idea…she cross checked the computer's memory system and storage for its astronomical charts, and realized almost immediately that barely a third of the memory was stored on surface level.
She backtracked and opened up the secondary level, then smiled at her own genius. The nav not only had the Chiss space charts stored within it, but the Republican charts as well, the 'known' galaxy, so to speak. Plugging her coordinates into that axis, the planet name immediately jumped to her screen.
Lehon; Lehon System.
Sawn frowned. She'd never heard of the planet. Then again, outside of the core worlds like Coruscant and Corellia, she didn't know anymore about the Republican Planets than they did of Chiss Space. She knew the two powers had come into contact in the past, but beyond that, she knew nothing, that kind of information was only for the highest seniority members of the Ascendancy.
But that didn't matter, using the Republican Nav, she managed to find the system closest to what they labeled the "Unknown Regions", aka, Chiss Space, and plotted a course for that system, knowing from there she could short jump into the Ascendancy's territory and plot a course back to base from there.
After double and triple-checking her complicated calculations, Sawn's gloved finger was half an inch from pressing the execute button when something stopped her. She didn't know what, or why, but something told her not to hit execute just yet.
"Always, always trust your instincts Sawn," Her mother had told her, the day she shipped off to base for training. "It will never bid you wrong."
Sawn found that she'd absentmindedly gripped the sapphire pendant that hung from her neck through her flight suit, as she often did when thinking of her mother. She saw the glimmer of a tear forming at the corner of her eye, she fought to control it when she realized there was no tear at all, the distant sun had just glimmered over something in space not more than twenty meters from her craft.
Curiously and cautiously, Sawn set her thrusters to a meager one percent, crawling forward towards the mysterious object that'd caught her eye. She cut thrusters as soon as she'd turned and faced the object, now hovering directly in front of her. There was no turning back now. She made a quick check of all the pressure sensors on her flight suit, put the engine on standby, adjusted the anti-gravity measures in her cockpit, and fastened a tethered harness to her unbreakable durasteel belt, then took a deep, calming breath, and released the latch on her cockpit.
Immediately she was shocked by the fierceness of the cold zero gravity, but she knew she'd only have to withstand it for a few scant seconds. She pulled herself along the outsides of her fighter with the utmost care until she could wrap her hands around the object and safely bring it back to the cockpit.
Closing the canopy immediately, Sawn thanked the claw craft designers for their incredible blueprints that allowed her fighter to not be compressed within itself in the zero-gravity, and numbly gazed upon her prize.
Finally ready to hit the execute button, Sawn did so, and spent the entire hyperspace flight admiring the four-sided triangle and its strange glyphs, marveling at the power she inherently knew laid inside.