Sabine dug her fingers into the dry dirt of the Sinviri ravine. She worked around the flat metal disc filled with high powered explosive paste with ease, unconcerned that she would fumble at removing the small activation hammer from the landmine. A small pop resonated as it dislodged, and Sabine rose to her feet with a satisfied smirk. She brushed off the old caked on clay and stowed it in her hip pouch for later, thermal paste she had more than enough of, but det-triggers could be a pain to make so it was sometimes better to salvage.
"Hey!" Shouted Giz as her head popped up from behind a slab of glossy black stone, "Three guesses as to who set all these mines." She hoisted up a familiar white breastplate, the previously polished and sleek luster was marred with age and large gashes ate away across most of the armor.
"Oh, wow what a surprise…" Sabine said in a mock tone, while it really wasn't a surprise, she had held on hope that the Empire would not have come back to the Sinviri moon. It seemed more and more likely that they would find only traces of what had already transpired years ago. "But really, what happened to this poor guy?" She inquired as she took the armor, running her fingers over the damage.
Reed tweedled at the two, rolling slowly over the rough dirt. A plate popped open on its dome and a holo communication booster rose from the slot in its head, being so far from the ships receiver it was necessary to use Reed to boost and intercept signals across the moon to communicate. Sabine chucked the damaged breastplate to the side and crouched eye level with the droids holo cam. She removed her Mandalorian helmet and took a quick swig of water from her canteen before receiving the call.
"This is LSF Wren reminding all citizens to be on the lookout for any suspicious activity," She said in a steady manner that reminded Lindmon of a city's security broadcast system, "and if you find any dangerous packages, please report them to the nearest security officer."
"What are you...never mind." Lindmon's form glowed the gentle blue from the holo, his expression showing the chase they had just gone through. "We found a shuttle. It's set up as a makeshift shelter, temporary generator and empty ration packages and all. How is the search on your end?" The holo seemed to glance behind themself, looking around whatever space they were in on the other side.
"Nothing but dirt, bombs, and stormtrooper bits here sir!" Giz chirped, shuffling around the black stone and coming over to the droid, leaning down to look at the holo. "You seem jumpy, everything ok?"
Lindmon took a second to respond, saying a few words to somebody off call, probably Sul. He turned back and condensed his thoughts. "We encountered...something. Some wildlife likely but there was some shadow that cajoled Sul into chasing it down, part of what led us here so I don't know if it's good or bad. Be aware though, and be careful. Something is off and I don't like it."
Sabine and Giz exchanged concerned looks. Lindmon had been distressed by what they found in the forest, enough to not even chuckle at Sabine's attempt at lightening the mood. Maybe they just hadn't encountered as many landmines as they had. One thing that alarmed them both was how Sul had acted; he wasn't one to go charging after shadows alone in the forest.
"We will." Sabine replied seriously, "It looks like the Empire beat us here by a few years. Giz and I are close to the escape pod, see what you can discover in that shuttle. We have to find all we can from what's left."
Again Lindmon seemed to look around him, more distracted than usual. "Good, carry on and let me know when you find it. Sundown is in a few hours, we will need to make sure we make the rendezvous. Good luck you two, may the Force be with you." He added quickly as the holo cut off and went dead. Reed chirped several times, his dome swiveling around in concern.
"Yeah he does seem really on edge. But don't worry Reed, if anyone can handle a bit of stress it's the LT." Giz gave the droid a quick pat before turning back to Sabine. "Alright 'LSF Wren' what's the next leg of the plan?" The smile on her face was betrayed by the slight bristle in her fur, the girl was obviously forcing herself to maintain her usual cheer.
Sabine grinned sheepishly, over the years she had come to identify with the security division on Lothal, adopting many of their manners and practices. Her previous introduction was used frequently among the units during raids or after reclaiming a cache of explosives. It was a light hearted way of poking fun at the city's broadcast system that encouraged its citizens to participate in the well-being and protection of their community.
She slipped on her helmet and rose to face the now landmine free path. "The next part of the plan…" She said, "Is to find out whatever else we can before sundown."
It wasn't long until they reached the escape pod, which seemed to be in good shape despite the rough landing it endured years ago. The emergency hatch however, was pockmarked by carbon scoring, likely left by blaster fire. It hung limply on damaged hinges and failed to entirely cover the interior. The seat had its standard crash webbing torn away in tatters, the hard plastiform seat caked with old blood from an unknown victim.
A vast spider-web-like array of wires hung across the inside of the pod, affixed to a tall metal tube housing powerful explosives. It was a deadly trap that was foiled by the ruined hatch exposing the scheme. The trigger was set to the inside of the door and rigged to blow when opened, with the volume of explosive inside it would be instant death for whomever yanked on the door.
Giz stepped forward carefully, surveying the wreckage. "Well, unless he could somehow skip across the moon in the blink of an eye, I think we found his pod."
Sabine eased the busted hatch open as far as it could go, before the tension on the wires activated the bombs inside. "If it is, it may be worth cutting through all this. The console doesn't look damaged," She replied hopefully, "There could be a recording on it, give us something to go on..."
"Well then our first major hurdle is this trap, if we set it off the whole craft will go up…" Popping her head just inside the door Sabine held open, Giz looked around at the net of wires and let out a small whistle.
"That's where I come in," Sabine replied, brandishing a pair of wire clippers and a handheld scanner. She moved into position, as Giz backed away from the small pod, eager to tackle this dangerous obstacle. "A lot of these wires are backup trigger points. It looks amateurish but having them like this makes it harder to sort out."
As Sabine steadied herself on the door Giz noticed a small movement in the dirt to the side of the pod. She peered closer and found a stray wire that led away from the pod, colored to camouflage itself against the dirt. It was difficult to tell what device the wire was connected to as it ran about twenty meters through the valley, finally twisting around a sharp corner.
"Um...hey, Sabine? There's one here too, likely leading to a remote detonation switch." Giz called over as she began following the wire. She pulled her pistols, giving them a brief twirl as she glanced back, a wide grin plastered to her face. Leveling her blasters towards the corner, she quickly rounded it.
Sabine paused at Giz's warning and watched as the lithe Cathar bounded over the rough terrain, following the path of the hidden wire. Taking the time to set up a secondary device to an already existing trap didn't bode well and she was embarrassed to have misread the degree of preparation the Empire put into this ruse.
Giz found the end of the wire quickly, and with a glance was able to determine that it was a small long-range signal generator. A simple box shaped device with a fixed half dome antenna jutting out from the top. It's intended purpose was not hard to guess, once the explosive trap was disarmed it would power on and send a simple signal somewhere in the galaxy. It was a trap within a trap, designed specifically to counteract anyone trying to defuse the escape pod and gain access to it.
This however, only held Giz's attention for a brief moment. Rising up from the base of the canyon were near perfect walls of the glossy obsidian stone. The striking rock formation was undoubtedly natural as there was no way any heavy mining operations existed here before.
The large carvings engraved into the stone were not.
Long slashes and small divots chiseled in the rock interrupted the natural shimmer given off by the sunlight, coming together to create a large mural. Several in fact, varying in size and quite frankly, the quality of the inscriptions. Many were small…no more than a meter or so, likely practice efforts before attempting the larger, less frequent drawings.
The tall figures of an older man, a forlorn woman and a spiteful looking man were the most prominent of all the drawings. They stood in front of an elaborate starfield that flowed outward in a series of beautiful circular sunbursts. Though the old man, the woman and man were all featured together in nearly half of these murals…the positions they took varied among each one and many were left unfinished.
Other smaller etchings were also among the drawings, appearing very close to the ground as if they had been carved while seated. At this distance it was hard to decipher the small symbols but there was clearly Aurabesh lettering with them.
Giz saw more evidence of the Empire's visit to the Sinviri moon in this location. Each of the black stone etchings had remnants of some kind of archeological examination. The dirt had been reshaped over time, removing all evidence of any tracks but the stone still showed the pit holes left behind by the stabilizing pegs for high tech scanning equipment. Much of the survey seemed to have been taken with whoever was examining this site, leaving only a few half-buried tarps, a busted and discarded footlocker and what looked like a damaged droid.
A large section of the obsidian rock wall was cut away from the rest of the stone, carefully machined with laser precision. The weight of the stone would have been thousands of pounds and moving a slab like that would have been a significant endeavor. Whatever carving adorned that section of the canyon must have represented something of extreme importance to the Empire.
Giz took a fair amount of time staring at the inscriptions, her ears flattening against her head as she leaned around the corner to call out to the Mandalorian toiling several yards away. "Um…. think we should… tell the lieutenant about this?" She waved her hand to beckon Sabine over, not taking eyes off the intricate drawings. "Have you seen anything like this before?"
Moving forward, the Cathar ran her fingers along the inscription, bending down to try and read the words carved into the ground. "Dissolve your essence…blend into the Force. Hide from them. Keep your presence buried." She read aloud, shaking her head. "I'm not really sure what I'm looking at here, but the Empire or… rather Thrawn, was fairly interested."
The inscription read like a series of notes. Alongside the words were a few crude drawings of a person in a seated position with lines flowing inward on some and outward on others, representing a sequence of meditation and breathing patterns. There were other sections of the stone wall like this, positioned haphazardly around the larger images. It was unclear if anything significant could be gleaned from them, many had slashes across them that rendered the text or images unreadable and one section looked like a crude series of hatch marks as if to mark a series of days.
"Whoa…" Sabine sighed as she took in the astonishing sight, "I've seen these before, yeah. There used to be a temple back home, it had a huge mural like the ones here. It looks like he had trouble remembering exactly how it looked."
"What are you saying, that Ezra did all this?" Replied Giz incredulously.
"I'm pretty certain." Sabine said, her voice growing with concern as she saw just how many hatch marks lined the black stone walls. There were hundreds. "…How long did they leave him here."
"The better question may be how long did it take them to find him. I doubt they just sat around a few months. Repairs on the ship be damned, if Thrawn was that gung-ho to capture him I doubt they would have wasted much time." Giz's fingers traced along the lines of the carving, her brow furrowed. "He set up the explosives knowing that when the empire did come, the wreckage would be the first they would check, the confusion from the explosion would have given him enough time maybe but…" she glanced back around the corner. "No explosion, and no Bridger."
Snapping her fingers, Giz called out to Reed. "Come take some shots of this so we can send them over, see what the L-T says. May be wise to plug into that droid too and see what it may have known."
Reed rolls over to the damaged droid, abandoned for years among the rocks. It's outer chassis was torn and marred by blaster fire, but the internal systems avoided critical damage. After cutting away at the outer plating Reed was able to plug directly into the central droid brain.
The droid was designed for data input and recording for use in geographical surveys and other jobs requiring high levels of appraisal. Reed easily overpowered the Imperial subprotocols protecting the lanky droid's system memory and ran through the last recorded instance the droid was active.
"…pared to tell me the purpose of repli—" A voice crackled through the droid's voice modulator alongside a loud hiss of static interference. Reed swiveled his domed head and beeped merrily at Giz, the survey droid's head pitched upward in response and its eyes activated. The audio recording played clearly relaying the droids last moments before it was rendered inoperable.
"…What were those things…?" Replied another voice, it was labored and raspy, but Sabine recognized it instantly. The way she responded to the voice led Giz to the same conclusion, this was the voice of Ezra Bridger, the missing Jedi they had been searching for, for close to eight months. "I haven't seen anything like them since I've been here!" He finished angrily.
"Why of course, you had been evading the Emperor's agents for such a long time on this desolate wasteland we had to resort to other measures to ensure your arrest." The voice responded with satisfied arrogance. He was an Imperial officer that had a keen eye for specialist artifacts, assigned to inspect this site on the edge of the galaxy after agents of the Grand Admiral discovered it. "They are a marvel of Imperial bio-technology. Our geneticists created them according to Grand Admiral Thrawn's exact specifications to deal with your specific form of devilry"
"Once our Ceraxyn were deployed, it was only a matter of hours before they dragged you out," The agent said, now turning his attention back to the original matter. "Now tell me, this inscription you carved along these walls. It has specific similarities to our records taken from Ossus, Wiek and Lothal, all of them have since been destroyed. I want to know why you thought to recreate it here."
"I bet you do." Ezra replied. An audible click was heard from the droid, for a moment it seemed like an audio disturbance if not for the shouting and sounds of blaster fire that followed. Ezra must have damaged the locking mechanism that kept him restrained.
"Blast him!" The agent shouted over the cacophony, troopers overturned tables and boxes to use as cover. Vicious growls and the snarls of some large beast pierced through the droid's voice modulator. "Don't let the target near the artifact!" The audio recording ended with a sharp pop, and silence hung over the canyon.
Giz and Sabine had made their way back at Reed's signal, both watching and listening with the same surprised and concerned expression. When the recording finally cut out a haze of blue static from the projector before it too cut off, the two stopped to look around them, both connecting the dots slowly.
"What do you think he meant by Ceraxyn..?" Giz asked, shifting over to a nearby batch of strewn debris and the damaged foot locker. "And, if he did reach the artifact, what's so special about it?"
Reed's head dome spun around, chirping several times before disconnecting and whirling his way to the black stone. The antenna and dish rose out from his top and spun about, relaying the images to the other side of the planet.
"I've never heard of anything called a Ceraxyn…" Sabine replied, still running the message over in her mind. "Whatever it is can't be good."
Giz tried pressing the latch on the front of the foot locker, but quickly resorted to a heavy kick after the rusted hinge failed to budge. The locker was filled with slices of the dark glossy stone, carefully placed atop dirty amber bricks. Jammed in between the hard case of the foot locker and a thick stone was a discarded holo-messenger, its components were smashed but with the right equipment it could be possible to discover who was on the other end.
"What about the mural then?" Giz pressed, "This is too much for some rocks and wall art Sabine. Why are they so interested in this?"
Sabine patted Reed's dome softly, checking that he had finished a rough scan of the canyon walls. She looked at Giz and pointed at the series of wall inscriptions with a serious expression, "Because it isn't just a mural. That…is a gateway."