Disclaimer: I own nothing but a bag of M&M's…and a pair of combat boots…
The Black Inferno Alchemist: Thanks. I cannot write any other style of poetry than this. Though I do have a little free verse coming up in later (much later) chapters.
Carey Ann Lupin: HUZZAH FOR NEW REVIEWER! Thanks for adding me to your C2, I feel very honored. Please stick around, as there shall be many more little clues to come. Thanks for reviewing!
Coyote Guardian Spirit: Okay, you get major cookies for trying to figure it out (Huzzah for you!). You are right on most counts, as you shall see here. as for the rest, you shall have to wait until the next chapter. Thanks so much for reviewing. BTW, how can there be a Celtic site in Pennsylvania in the 1100's? Just wondering…
Han-Skywalker: Well, I got this out before my six-week deadline (Huzzah for me!). glad that my writing helps you get through school, and I understand what you mean. Its worse when you have homework on stuff that teachers haven't covered in class (ooooh that irks me to no end!) ANYWAY, I've figured out a way to get the gang to earth, so be on the lookout for that. thanks again for the idea.
Indy Pollard: thank you thank you thank you. I've got more detail in this one (mostly because I stink at writing conversations…)
Jedi Master Evenstar: HOORAH FOR NEW REVIEWER! Thank you ever so much for reviewing and I hope that you stick around for the end. As for LeiaXIndy shipping…uhhh…no. I am a definite LeiaXHan shipper…not that Han knows that… ;-D
Jedi X-Man: Oh I am SOOOO GLAD! And a new computer: HUZZAH! Thanks for the review!
RavenRulzRF: Updated, and guess what? The gag is only mentioned here…hehehe. Tell me what you think and thanks for reviewing.
Only nine reviews? Hmmm…maybe I should take a sabbatical if y'all aren't interested in this anymore.
Chapter 21
Sirocco
"You can NOT be serious." Heads twisted to look at Han. The pirate had a mixture of shock and utter disbelief plastered on his face as he glared at Reighyn.
"I beg your pardon?" The Sodukan's cocked his head and stared at Han, bewildered.
"Do you mean to tell me that you've already figured that out?" Han pointed at the silver-grey stone in Leia's hands.
"Oh yes, it is quite easy, that it is." Indy glanced up briefly from his note taking, only to take in the nodding heads of the other Sodukans, before he asked the question on the questor's minds.
"So, what are we supposed to do then?" Reighyn smiled.
"It will be easier to show you, that it will. But first, we must eat."
DXVJKE
The hyperdrive was broken, again. Chewbacca sighed as he reached for a wrench. It seemed like the Falcon was constantly breaking ever since they began this accursed, galactic, treasure hunt. But the Wookie had seen enough of the Jedi to know that when a particular course of action was advised, it was best to follow that plan. Distant memories of the Clone Wars echoed through his mind as he twisted his arm a little more to tweak this one wire. Friendship, betrayal, slavery, the humiliation of his people at the hands of the empire; no, this could not happen again. One emperor was enough and the rise of a second must be stopped at all costs. Even if it meant living in the engine room to keep the hyperdrive working.
Still, it would be nice if whatever hand of fate kept breaking it would quit. Chewbacca slowly extricated his mass from the inner workings of the 'drive, careful not to break any of the repairs he had just made. R2 was waiting at on the last bit of flat metal grate before the beginnings of jumbled mass termed the hyperdrive. The little droid had been reporting on the progress that Chewbacca made, reading it off the diagnostic computer, pinpointing what must be fixed, and beeping it across the engine room. The Wookie had begun to develop a friendship with R2, finding that his ingenuity and usefulness were almost designed for the constant repairs that the Falcon needed.
The two of them had been going at the 'drive for nearly eight hours without rest. Chewbacca was dusty, sore, practically covered in lubricant, and hungry, a dangerous combination for any Wookie. R2 tried to better their situation with a cheerful procession of beeps reporting on the current stability of the 'drive. Chewbacca was a little pleased, but more interested in dinner and sleep. It is no wonder, therefore, when he nearly tore C3PO's arms off.
DXVJKE
C3PO had spent three of the past ten hours since Master Luke and the others had left reorganizing the various language references the computer had in its banks. Afterwards, finding that Chewbacca and R2 were engrossed in that horrible mess that General Solo termed the hyperdrive, he went into the cockpit with the intention of listening for any signals that Master Luke raised. After an hour of silence, he shut himself off for the next six.
C3PO snapped his circuits on to as the com unit crackled to life.
"Hey, anyone awake there?" C3PO jerked forward to answer Han's computer recreated voice.
"Yes, General Solo, how may I be of assistance?" The protocol droid thought for an instant that he heard a groan, but he brushed it off as interference.
"Where's Chewie?" C3PO had always suspected that the pirate captain disliked him, but, as human emotions were always so difficult to comprehend, ignored it. The brusque manner in Han's voice was therefore processed as fatigue due to the long search that he was on.
"Down repairing the hyperdrive I believe, sir."
"Well, go get him!" It must have been a very long search.
"Certainly. One moment." C3PO shut off the com and exited the cockpit as quickly as his circuits could carry him. The urgency in Han's voice must mean that they were either in danger or were very close to discovering the location of the next clue. Though C3PO really dislike all this scampering about the galaxy, it was of great importance to Master Luke, and that was all that really mattered. Brightening internally with the line of thought that he was helping in every possible way he could, he was quite dismayed to run into a very disgruntled Wookie. And he did literally run into him.
"Chewbac—Umph." Though his parts were very sturdy, the mass of a simple protocol droid was nothing in comparison with that of a full grown Wookie. C3PO struggled for a minute to regain his feet before relaying his message.
"Chewbacca, General Solo is on the com. He wishes to talk with you."
"Aaarnnngg eehhhhh."
"No, he didn't say exactly why. But he was quite urgent, I suggest you hurry." In retrospect, it was probably not his place to induce speed in Chewbacca's gait. Still, such a small prodding in the correct direction was in no rational way the reason for the Wookie's actions. Chewbacca slammed C3PO in the chest with such force that the protocol droid flew nearly two feet before hitting the bulkhead. He watched Chewbacca stalk off towards the cockpit as R2 whirred up next to him. The little droid let off a series of quiet beeps.
"Slightly agitated?" C3PO gingerly sat up, mentally probing for damaged circuitry. "R2, you have a gifting for understating the obvious."
DXVJKE
In all actuality, slightly agitated was the extent of Chewbacca's foul mood. It wasn't that he was angry, just tired. He had had too much to do in one short span of time and the hyperdrive was nearly all consuming. The thought of firing up the engine before his repairs had had time to set in was frustrating. Not to mention the fact that going to save Han and the others meant no dinner and no bed, at least not for a while. Still, the Wookie's sense of loyalty was all consuming and he could NOT leave his friends in whatever situation they were.
He slumped into his seat in the cockpit and flipped on the com unit. "Aaarrrhhhnnn."
"Chewie? Glad it's you and not that gold plated little…how's the hyperdrive?"
"Arrnn eeeooohhhhh hhnnnn aggg."
"That well? Sure hope it takes this time."
"Ghhhhnnnn urhhh."
"I need you to pick us up in about an hour. Think the Falcon'll be ready by then?"
"Yyynnnnn urr hhhhggggg uooollllllhh. Jhhnn arrrhnn eoolllnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn."
"Hour-an-a-half's fine. There's a huge mesa where we're camped; we'll meet you there. I'll send the coordinates in a sec."
"Ernn hvvnnn arrrhhhnnn."
"Right, see ya then." The com went silent and Chewbacca sighed with relief. There was no need for a last minute rescue attempt, no rush that would break his painstaking repairs, and even time for dinner. The urgency that C3PO had mentioned must have been to get the protocol droid off the com. Chewbacca almost laughed, C3PO could be quite annoying at times. The Wookie stood and moved off to the mess area.
DXVJKE
The hour and a half flew by rather quickly as Chewbacca and R2 went through finalizing all their repairs and prepairing for takeoff. C3PO was standing watch over the com in case any more messages came through. He was happy to help; Chewbacca was happy he was helping somewhere else. Last minute checks were run through and the Falcon slowly lifted herself from her rusty resting-place and hovered in the lower atmosphere. The coordinates that Han had sent through were barely a mile from where they were currently; thus there was no need to fly far. The closeness of their new destination, however, meant that Chewbacca was going to be doing some very delicate maneuvering to keep the Falcon level and in one piece.
The sun had set nearly two hours ago and the night was a mixture of starlight and sulfur, which made the stars look very golden and hazy. Only the bright ones could be picked out, not that Chewbacca was stargazing. His attention was more on the hidden spires of rock, sudden up thrusts from the sulfur swamps below, and general atmospheric phenomena that reminded him why he hated flying within a planet's atmosphere.
There. Chewbacca spotted the mesa where Han and the others were waiting. He could make out the beams of their flashlights as they guided him down. The Falcon gently touched the mesa, slowly letting her full weight down as Chewbacca gauged whether the rock face would hold. It did.
Chewbacca waited in the living area with C3PO and R2 for the group to enter. Han and Luke did so first, dumping the extra gear, followed by Indy, who was gingerly handling the stone tablets, and Leia. The last to enter the room was Reighyn, who was quickly introduced. The Sodukan gingerly sat on one of the couches, his golden eyes taking everything at once.
"This will be an adventure, that it will," he smiled. "My people rarely travel in these space ships."
"Speaking of traveling, you gonna tell us where we're going now?" Han asked gruffly. He was glad to be back in the Falcon, but a ship's kind of useless without a destination.
"Yes," Reighyn offered him a small scrap of sandstone. On in was a set of numbers, coordinates. "These will be helpful, I believe." Han took the rock and, motioning to Chewbacca, headed towards the cockpit.
"How did you get coordinates?" Leia asked.
"Oh, we have the maps that the Galactic Cartographer's Society made for our world, that we do. They are old, but still effective, I believe."
"Will you tell us how you got the answer so quickly?" Indy asked, taking out his notebook.
"Of course. The destination is quite simple, that it is. We must go to Sirocco."
"Go where?"
"Sirocco. It is one of the two tallest mountains on Soduka, that it is. The other is Eirené, which is slightly taller, but does not fit the description, it does not."
"What do you mean?" Luke asked
"The riddle speaks of wind. Eirené has barely any, as it sits on our equator, that it does. The destination, then, is easy to understand, yes it is. The rest makes little sense to me, but as I have said before, this is why I wish to come, that I do." Reighyn had requested during dinner to travel with them so that he might fully know the answer to the riddle. His people could not abide with an unsolved puzzle, and, as solving the rest meant performing the actions given, a witness was needed. Reighyn seemed almost overjoyed at the prospect of traveling with them.
DXVJKE
When Reighyn spoke of Sirocco being a mountain, Indy had pictured it as merely a larger version of the sandstone pillars that they had spent all day climbing over. Then, they reached the mountain's base, and all ideas of a large pillar were purged. Sirocco was massive; there was no way around it. It was like standing in the base of the Grand Canyon on Earth and looking up at Denali. The majority of the sandstone pillars slowly descended into the swamps, creating a massive bowl out of which Sirocco rose. The mountain was huge and dwarfed the few other mountains that surrounded it. Her peak was easily as tall as Everest, if not taller, but it did not look snowcapped.
The eastern sky was growing pink with the approaching sunrise. Indy, Luke, Leia and Reighyn had joined Han and Chewbacca in the cockpit to stare at Sirocco in the growing daylight. The slight light marked the mountain against the darker western sky, making her height and mass all the more apparent. Han was beginning to recalibrate the Falcon's stabilizers to compensate for the wind coming off the mountain's face while Chewbacca scanned for anyplace they could set down.
"Urrnn iiiiihhhhvvvvv alln. Jjhhhhhhhhhhhh." Han looked over at him sharply.
"You're kidding." Indy, still confused by the Wookie's speech, asked for a translation.
"He said that the mountain is mostly igneous rock with a massive hollow cavern in its middle."
"You mean it's a volcano?"
"Dormant, but yeah."
"Great," Indy swore softly under his breath. Climbing through a volcano was not his idea of fun. Dormant? Yeah right. Knowing his luck, it would probably go off underneath their feet.
They found a small shelf near the top of Sirocco that could support the Falcon. The droids again elected to stay within the Falcon; the others began to climb. The slope of the mountain was steep igneous rock, gritty with sand, and barren of any vegetation. The ancient magma crust was worn smooth by the acid rain, and any ascent would have been impossible except that the same acid rain had collected in tiny pockets, making perfect hand and toe holds. The atmosphere was thin, nearly nonexistent, and all members were given oxygen masks.
Reighyn went up first. As he was the lightest and by far the most agile of the group, he took by far the most dangerous job. He would climb some ten feet above the rest of them and hammer a sharp spike into the mountain's face. On the spike, he was to clip the climbing rope to which they were all harnessed, and then ascend the next ten feet. At sunrise, which was a little more than an hour away, they had to be at the peak, a little more than 150 feet above them, by Indy's estimation. The hand and toe holds made the ascent easier, but it was going to be quite a squeeze to climb ten feet every four minutes. Still, they had to try.
Reighyn had the first two spikes set, with Indy bracing him during the hammering part, when the wind began to blow. Though they had figured some wind during the climb, this kind of wind was insane. It was gale force, cold, bone dry, and filled with gritty, skin tearing, sand. Indy was blessing his lucky stars that Luke had sense enough to issue goggles to everyone before they began climbing. The sand filled his clothes, burned at the areas of exposed skin, and generally numbed him with its icy fingers.
The first blast of wind shook them with its unexpected force. They all clung instinctively to the side of the mountain and froze there. Luke, on the bottom, realized that if they stayed like this they would never make it anywhere. He reached up and began climbing until he bumped into Chewbacca, just above him. The Wookie looked down, catching the signal to move upward and also began to climb. This upwards moving cascade knocked into Leia next, then Han, Indy and at last Reighyn. The Sodukan was not happy about this at all. His people never went out in this kind of wind, except in dire need, for fear of losing flight control. But he had to move.
Keeping as close as he could to the rock face, Reighyn inched upwards, with Indy at his heels, to the next ten foot mark. The archeologist offered up the next spike and leaned his weight against the back of Reighyn's legs. The Sodukan fitted the spike into a handhold and raised the hammer to slam it into the rock. The wind blew down fiercely and Reighyn lost his grip, falling backwards. Indy reached up instinctively and slammed his forearm into Reighyn's back, giving him that instant of resistance he needed to regain balance. Reighyn hooked the hammer's claw into a foothold and used it to pull himself upright. Ascent began again.
DXVJKE
The summit was a small, scooped out, caldera, some thirty feet in diameter and half as deep. The western side was crusted with ice, the eastern side with sand. The wind was a fierce constant, cold and incessant, though slightly moister than it had been during their climb. The group rolled over the side in various states of exhaustion. Luke carefully unhooked himself from the tether and gingerly stood up. They had been practically silent on the climb up and when he spoke over the com links, the broken silence sounded eerie and nearly sacrilegious.
"What do we do now?" The others also untethered themselves as Indy replied.
"Watch the sun rise." He reached numbed fingers into his bag for his journal.
The bitter wind let up just enough them to get up off the sandy floor so that they could watch the sun rise. It broke the clouds with such finality that it almost blinded the six weary climbers with its light. The intense red gold light poured and swirled in amongst pillars of amber making them shine like pure gold. The sunlight slowly shifted through the clouds, ticking past the seconds as they waited for something to happen. It took nearly an hour of waiting, watching the landscape change beneath their feet, before the silence was broken again.
"Why was it so important to get up here before sunrise just to wait here for hours?" Leia sighed. Sometimes Han as absolutely no appreciation for beauty whatsoever. She was about to respond when a soft groan issued from beneath their feet.
"What the Sith was that?" The ground beneath their feet began to tremble, like some giant shaking in his sleep. Indy's first idea was that the volcano had reactivated, but there was no change in temperature. They moved instinctively away from the center of the caldera and towards the last of the climbing spikes. The rumbling increased and the wind picked up, hurtling over the opposite side of the caldera and whipping at the sand near their feet.
A grinding, crashing sound began, but the sand flew so fiercely that none dared to look at what was going on. Indy clapped the journal to his chest with his left hand and wrapped his right arm around the flapping end of the tether. The others followed suit, groping blindly to find the rope, hanging on for dear life. The grinding reached near deafening proportions and then stopped.
The wind too had stopped. Or rather, it had stopped blowing at them. The sand no longer blinding him, Indy slowly opened his eyes and watched the swirling vortex of freezing wind being sucked into a large crevice in the caldera's center.
"What the hell…?" At his comment the others too moved away from the edge and toward this apparent mystery.
"That…that was not…here…it was not," Reighyn stuttered. Indy began flipping through his journal to write what happened as the others examined the phenomenon.
"What do we do?" Leia asked.
"Go down there," Indy said, handing her his copy of the latest clue.
"AUUUUUURRRRRNNNNNNN!"
"I'm with Chewie. No way on Eckk's red world am I going down there." The black mouth continued to suck away at the cold sulfuric air. Indy could see his point.
"We have to," Leia said grimly.
"Are you out of your MIND?" Han whirled around to face her. "Leigh, come on, go down THERE?"
"Yes, down there. Listen: 'The might Sirocco shall trace the path to walk behind the sun. Follow long this road of wind.' That's where the clue leads."
"These people are nuts." Han growled as he reached to get the gear that he took off an hour ago. "Absolutely nuts."
"I too am beginning to question the Jedi's sanity, that I am," Reighyn sighed. He stretched his huge wings and carefully refolded them so as not to damage them in the descent. Indy took his journal back from Leia, put it in his pack, and began to buckle himself back into the climbing harness.
"Right, lets get back into our positions so we can begin descending."
"That won't be necessary, Indy," Luke said, rounding the hole.
"Huh?"
"Look." The Jedi walked back around to the far side of the wind tunnel, with Indy in tow, and pointed at the ground.
"Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle."
Any guesses as to what they found? And you shall have to guess 'cause I'm not telling. Right, just a heads up to all of y'all who still read this, I'm gonna take a bit of a break from Raiders to do some reorganization of the plot. Some of my original ideas are not going to work now, and as I hate plot bunnies, I need to do a massive overhaul on my outline for the story. All that is to say is this story is probably gonna end up with around 50 chapters total and I don't think my next chapter will come out until sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. My mind needs a break, I have midterms coming up, and I'm going to give my muses a much needed Vacation. So, if a chapter comes out before November be surprised. Reviews may encourage me to go a little faster, but anyways, thanks for being such great readers/reviewers and I'll look foreward to seeing you in November. Til then, I am as ever,
DarkX