The present…
Ahsoka slowly awoke, confusion furrowing her brow. For a hazy moment she didn't know where she was, but in a rush everything came flooding back. She swung around and found herself in the middle of a vast solar sail feeling extremely fortunate that she was both alive and not floating helplessly alone in space.
'How am I still here?' she thought looking down at her suit. The lights of the control module were faint but present.
Deciding not to press her luck any further she grasped the sail where she could and pulled herself closer to the unknown vessel. She was now much further back along the ship than where she had crossed over from the Remnant and could no longer see the hatch she had been trying to pry open. As she approached the hull a second time she noticed the lights in her helmet flickering and were slowly growing brighter. It appeared that something about the ship was counteracting the power drain.
Grabbing a hold of the hull plating she pulled her lightsaber from her hip and snapped it open. The light from the blade was still weak, but much more coalesced than it had been on the Remnant. Somewhat reassured she closed the blade and replaced it.
Surveying the ship around her she caught sight of what appeared to be a ship-to-ship airlock nearby. She carefully picked her way around the sails and associated rigging until the entryway came into full view. A small view port was centrally located on the airlock door and Ahsoka eased herself up to it peering warily inside. The interior was a dimly lit airlock and beyond was darkness.
'Well, I can't stay out here…'
She found the airlock control valve and, after resisting her initial attempts, it finally gave and spun into the open position. Half expecting an alarm or other unwanted attention Ahsoka pulled herself into the airlock and unceremoniously fell into a heap on what she had thought was the ceiling. Thankfully her helmet took the brunt of the impact otherwise she would have had a nasty bump to accompany a sure headache.
Ahsoka rolled onto her back and using her feet swung the airlock door closed behind her. Now that she was no longer in open space she took a second to examine her EV suit readout. She was startled to see that her power reserve was nearly half full and that the oxygen reserve levels were at 95%. None of this made any sense.
She pushed the mystery aside for now and standing moved to the inner airlock hatch. It took a moment for pressurization to occur, but in a bit a green indicator light came on and she was able to open the inner door. Beyond was a dark hallway lit by flickering bulbs placed too far apart to properly provide sufficient illumination.
Turning back to the airlock, Ahsoka walked to the outer hatch once more and peered out through the viewport. Still trailing far behind on the tow line she could see the darkened form of the Remnant. There was no going back until she figured out why this ship had power and hers didn't.
Her suit was making her clumsy now that she was back inside, so she carefully removed it leaving the helmet in place until the last. This she slowly opened, ready to reclose it in an instant if the air proved unbreathable, but all was well with the ship's atmosphere. Finding a convenient corner she stowed her EV suit well out of sight.
Ahsoka silently made her way into the ship now. It had appeared much larger from the outside, most likely a result of the mass of sails and rigging, but in reality it seemed only slightly bigger than the Remnant. The hallway seemed to dead end to her left so she began creeping along the pathway to her right.
The ship felt ancient with very few electronic enhancements and everywhere she looked she saw piping instead of electrical conduit, gauges instead of displays, and manual levers instead of buttons. Water dripped rhythmically down onto a large heat coil where it hissed instantaneously into puffs of steam.
The decking hummed and vibrated in pulsing thrums beneath her giving Ahsoka the distinct impression the ship was more of a living organism than a conglomeration of technology. So far she had heard nothing in the way of the ship's inhabitants and was perfectly fine with that.
Besides the amorphous collection of pipes that seemed to endlessly snake around each other, the passage was bereft of any familiar structures. There also did not appear to be any doors or windows either, except for the airlock hatch now far behind her. The darkness didn't help her unease and as much as she wanted to have her lightsaber in her hand, she left it where it hung on her belt, trusting to the shadows instead.
A junction loomed ahead. The passage to her right led forward to what she felt must be the command portion of the vessel. She was turning that direction when soft singing echoed down the aft hallway abruptly making her halt. There was something strangely sad in melody that made it seem to hang in the air, brief strains of a timid voice with no discernable words.
She stood frozen listening for a moment before almost unknowingly turning left and, with silent steps, inched toward the source of the sound. As she rounded a slight bend in the hallway a shaft of light pierced out from behind a slightly opened hatch, highlighting the moisture that hung in ragged swirls near the ceiling. The singing was coming from behind the doorway and along with it now she could hear the sound of someone moving about in the chamber.
With only a slight hesitation Ahsoka crept up and peered into the crack and was startled to see a small Genian girl. Her skin was a rich shade of violet, while her bright eyes shone a startling blue in the low light. She stood on her tip toes reaching up to a high shelf to lithely pull down a jug of some unknown grey liquid which she proceeded to pour into a tray of fancy fluted cups on a counter in front of her. Ahsoka stared intently at the precise movements the girl had, all the while the lilting song washed about the tiny room.
Without noticing, Ahsoka stepped into the room, mesmerized by the fluid motions of the girl as she swayed in time with her song. The notes were reaching a high point as the girl gently lifted the tray full of brimming glassware and spun towards the door.
The song choked off mid phrase with a piercing shriek while the tray and its contents tumbled to the floor to shatter into a mixture of shards and spilled drink. The girl turned immediately and cowered in the nearest corner, her eyes averted and hidden behind an upturned arm. Ahsoka instinctively reached out in an attempt to comfort her when she heard the heavy foot falls approaching rapidly down the hallway behind her.
''''''
Rogar the Ruthless had aptly earned his name. Out here at the edges of the known galaxy if you wanted to survive, let alone lead a group of cutthroats, you had to be remorseless and Rogar had that in spades. Since the sudden end of his captivity a few years back he had taken every advantage presented to him, the first being the gift of the pair of creatures, one small, one almost too huge to comprehend. It had taken him a bit to figure it out, but before long Rogar had surmised that somehow the giant creature, whom he'd begun referring to as "Mum", was emitting some form of dampening field. That field permeated an incredibly vast region of space all around her disabling any ship unfortunate to enter into it. The small creature, which he called "Spring", seemed to respond to Mum's emission by generating an opposite field that cancelled the effect out, but with a much smaller and more focused radius that weakened rapidly the further away you were from Spring. With much care, and a few bumps and bruises to show for it, Rogar had built a cage around Spring and attached conduit wiring from the ship's power systems to the cage itself so that the energy field Spring emitted was more efficiently piped throughout the ship. With a little ingenuity he'd managed to get the whole ship powered.
From there it had been easy pickings, cruising about scavenging amongst the detritus of ships floating listless in the silence caused by Mum. The first prize he'd taken, his former prison ship, had almost been his last though. He had painstakingly moved Spring from the solar sailing ship's cargo bay into the much better equipped prison transport. But he had, most fortunately in retrospect, managed to drop the cage heavily on the transport's cargo deck. In a flash of bursting lights almost all of the electronics on the transport had irreparably burned out. It turned out that when provoked, Spring's energy field could fluctuate wildly and easily overload sensitive circuitry. If he had managed to get Spring aboard safely it would have only been a matter of time before she would have eventually disabled the transport and who knows how far away from the solar sailer he could have been. He was hard pressed as it was to get her back onto the solar sailer. With its old components and relatively simple computing system, the solar sailer seemed to be mostly immune to any real damaging effects from Spring's outbursts, though they could fairly easily cause surges and trip fuses throughout the ship.
And thus his reign of terror had begun, mostly benign at first as he picked his way through the dead ships in his domain. But before long he had run out of ships to scavenge and had needed to look further afield, which meant finding some like-minded individuals to watch his back. He'd found Scruggs wallowing in a pint of Lorpan Ale on Virgillia 7 and they had enjoyed a successful partnership right up to the point that Scruggs had both literally and figuratively stabbed him in the back. If he hadn't been so desensitized to pain from his extended sojourn as Vrynax's guest things might have ended right there for him. But lady luck had once again smiled at him as Scruggs' blade had lodged into his scapula. A fragment of the tip still remained in the old wound to this day, a constant reminder to never trust anyone.
After Scruggs there had been at least a half dozen other riffraff that had meandered into his life, none of them emerging alive. Currently, his compatriots were made up of a pair of smugglers named Crog and Phaloth. He'd found them skulking in a dark corner of one of his favorite watering holes on a nearby planet…
