Luke stretched out his senses, trying to anticipate where the hidden objects were lying in the dark chamber so he wouldn't trip over them as he sprinted back to the techs who were under attack by the droid or droids that had slipped past him and Jyr. He rushed towards them, his effervescent blade bobbing in front of him while he searched for the origin of the attack. He backtracked another blaster shot as it struck one of the Wookiees, dropping the massive warrior to his knees. Luke reached out for the dimly visible droid with the force as he hurdled another thick, low lying object on the floor.
The metallic spider was suddenly pulled up off the floor and thrown into the nearby wall with a resulting clank/thud upon impact, however the droid didn't slink to the ground as one would expect. Instead, Luke pulled it back several meters from the wall and threw it against the impossibly hard surface again, and again, and again.
Luke finally reached the group as he continued to thrash the droid against the wall to no avail. The armor plating on the droid seemed to be made of the same material as the stubborn walls, and it was unwilling to break or even dent. Glancing once at Hhkarak and his bloody chest, then at the dead body of one of the techs, Luke felt his ire rise.
He dropped the droid to the ground then hit it with another cascade of energy that froze it dead in its tracks. He punctured its armor with a long hold of his blade against the tough battle plates and gutted it like the other after his lightsaber finally cut through. Once finished, he channeled his aggression into a determination to help his companions and sought out the injured Wookiee. Jyr continued to fight off in the distance, but Luke could feel him gaining the upper hand and decided to let him finish the droids on his own.
With a constant vigil set on the immediate vicinity and the sealed door behind them, Luke extended a hand to the Wookiee's bloody bandoleer and slipped his fingers beneath it. Hhkarak howled in pain but didn't allow himself to flinch from the Jedi's touch.
Luke slowed the massive bleeding and numbed the searing pain as much as he could. He accelerated Hhkarak's natural healing abilities while using the force to try and close his wound. After a few long minutes, in which he heard and felt Jyr finish off the other droids and seal the chamber's remaining open door, the round, charred puncture wound had shrank down to a pinprick on the surface, but interior damage still remained…damage that Luke couldn't heal without putting the Wookiee into a coma-like trance.
A quick check of the Wookiee's emotions suggested that he wasn't in a compatible mood at present. Luke released his connection and retracted his hand.
The female tech had pulled the dead man's head into her lap and was talking to him as if he was wounded, but still alive. Luke gently reached for her hands and forced her to look into his eyes. "He's gone…I'm sorry, but we need you to focus on your skills. We're still in danger and fighting in the dark."
The woman sniffed, trying to contain her tears and reluctantly let her fellow tech's body slip to the floor. "We have a small generator. I can hook up a flood light."
Another tech, a young man barely past puberty, walked over to the pair as Luke helped the tech to her feet. "We may be able to power the room's own lights, if we can find an interface for the power cables…we brought generic converters."
"Flood light first," Luke suggested, "then we can see what equipment there is lying around to work with."
Jormukkar, meanwhile, walked over to the downed droid and pumped two shots from his bowcaster into it before snarling one of the harshest lines of invective that Luke had heard in a century. When he finished, he pulled apart the droid leg by leg, which told Luke that the joints weren't made of the same material as the outer skin. He'd have to remember that the next time he encountered a live one.
Appalled as he was by what had just happened, the elder tech gingerly nudged past the towering Wookiee and began examining the disconnected pieces. He continued the Wookiee's work, pulling apart the interior components for additional study as Jyr walked out of the shadows, his lightsaber unlit.
"Are we clear?" Luke asked.
Jyr nodded. "There was a fourth door that the droids came through. It's closed now, and I don't think they can open it without power."
Luke flinched, closing his eyes against the immensely bright floodlight as it shot towards the high ceiling. He closed down his lightsaber and reattached it to his belt. "What now?" he asked, looking around at the cluttered room. Broken technology laid scattered everywhere.
"We explore the room," he said simply.
Luke nodded his agreement and took up the watch on two of the techs while Jyr bent over and rifled through some of the nearby debris. Hhkarak pulled himself over to the floodlight and sat next to it, intent on guarding their only real source of light. Jormukkar traveled with the last tech as he headed off along the far right wall towards the shadows that the massive floodlight couldn't dismiss. The room was so large that it remained only half lit. The other half, where the droids had entered, remained eerily dark.
After an hour and a half, a salvageable dataport and console had been repaired and interfaced with their handheld computers. They were unable to power any of the room's utilities, but they did have a data connection to the structure's main computer…which amazingly still had power of its own, sequestered in some far off section of the facility.
Luke considered that odd. After several millennia he would have expected the entire facility to be as lifeless as the chamber they were currently holed up in, but when they pulled up a schematic of the impossibly large subsurface structure, they quickly found that only the upper regions were without power. Only three levels below had the power conduits been severed. Everything above that, including their current location, remained dark…figuratively and literally.
"Lord Jyr," the female tech said into the silence, "a datafile keeps trying to override my commands, no matter what I do. I can't make any headway around it."
"What file is it?" Jyr asked, placing a hand on her shoulder. He could sense her fragile nerves and subtly tried to sooth them.
"I thought it was some type of counter-intrusion software at first, but it's not breaking my connection to their systems, just blocking entry while asking to be activated."
"Asking?" Luke added as he joined the conversation around a low conical terminal.
"There's an activation prompt on the datafile," she said, mystified. "What do you want me to do?"
"There's no way around it?" Jyr asked, just to be sure.
"Not that I can find."
Jyr said nothing for a moment, then a strange look crossed over his face. "Try it and see what happens."
The tech didn't look pleased, but she didn't complain either. She tapped the icon on her display screen and suddenly the built-in holoprojector sprouted the image of a dragon. It stood on four low legs resplendent with razor-sharp claws and a thin, tapering tail. Its head was as angular as the doorway, with two raised eye bumps on top. The hologram bared its teeth and looked directly at the user.
"I record this message," it said in basic, "for whomever may find this city. Our enemy means to bury us alive, for they do not have the strength to tear through our walls by brute force alone, nor can they fight their way past the upper levels. We however, entombed within our great city, are gradually starving to death. Our supplies have run low these past four years, and we have not the capability to produce more within the confines of the capitol."
The Dragon hissed, long and slow. "A regrettable lapse on the part of the designers, but it is as it is. We have tried and failed to build a bio-synthesis facility from scratch, and our attempts to tunnel up to the surface have met with nothing less than a Rakatan assault force waiting for us. They seem to know where and when we will tunnel out, and have thwarted any attempts at escape."
"Our hangar bays have been covered over by kilometers of dirt, so we don't even have the option of flying out to meet our deaths at the hands of their orbital fleet. We have consigned ourselves to one last assault on the surface rather than sit by and die a long and slow death, deprived of nourishment. We are almost ready to break through to the surface, where we will fight to our eventual deaths."
"However, we will not let the mongrels have our great city for themselves. We may not have the means to sustain our bodies, but our factories have ample raw materials gathered from the planet's crust to build and sustain our droid security forces. We have assembled an army to aid our fight to the surface, but a sizeable force is being left behind to close the new tunnel and slaughter any of the fools who attempt entry into the city."
"If any of our brethren have managed to survive elsewhere in the galaxy and it is you who are hearing this message…the vault may still be intact. We have taken all precautions to guard against intruders, but these vermin have powers beyond our understanding. If they have discerned the secrets hidden within then I have no doubt they will stop at nothing until this city is ground unto dust. However, since they are content to bury us beneath the surface, I believe they do not know of the lower levels, and with any luck, the vault will remain hidden and safe until an ally returns to open it."
"If it is to an ally I speak, beware, for our defenses will not lay down for you. We cannot risk Rakatan duplicity. The lower levels are well guarded, and only the key of Anmar or the jewel of Netharis will persuade them to let you pass. If you do not possess these heirlooms turn back and return to the surface immediately, for you are in great peril."
"If this should be the day of our last breath then know this…we would not submit to the invaders. We defied them to the last."
The hologram deactivated and computer access was restored.