Findings Log — 11247
Dagobah
Dr Mary Au'Rona
"R3, you wake up this instant," I shouted from the cockpit. "I can't see a thing but I think we're about to crash. I think you made a mistake somewhere."
Artie's see-thru dome lit up and rotated 360º as he whistled a discourteous string of obscenities at me.
"It's either you or the ship," I said as the yoke jerked away from my sweaty palms. "You keep us on course. I'll get us down."
The Converso pushed through the fiery atmosphere above Dagobah and plunged into a thick, dense cloud. Plumes of damp fog rolled past the viewport, thick like curtains with no end, and made it difficult for even Artie to navigate. He whistled to me that I needed to maintain our descent and he would do the rest. My knuckles were white on the controls for full minutes after we touched down.
Unless my eyes were tricking me, we landed in the middle of a swamp. "Okay, you definitely made a mistake."
Artie ran through it a thousand times, but we were in the right place, he was sure of it.
"I don't suppose we'll find any old neighbors nearby," I said and hung my head. He beeped back that there might not be any sentient beings on the planet at all, then moan in an almost guilt-ridden sort of way. Such a waste of time and effort.
"Do we cut our losses?" he asked.
"We just got here." I stood to leave the cockpit. "I'm going to see what, if anything, this place has to do with Pop. Besides, I'm not in any rush to try and fly out of this fog."
I got myself dressed in thermals and synthetic waterproof gear and retrieved my datapad. "It's breathable atmosphere. Reading a .05 variance in gravity. Water and ground are tenable. Hey, you reading all these life-forms? The place is crawling with them."
Artie warned that not all wildlife is friendly, and offered to let me stay with the ship. I opened the landing ramp and climbed down. "You just make sure you keep busy while I do all the hard work."
He gurgled out a long list of reasons why that was preposterous before I could get out of earshot.
My first steps were wet. Nearly all the ones to follow would be as well. I looked back to see the Converso's skids rested in a half-meter of murky, green water herself. Atta-girl, getting dirty never scared you. I wasn't sure if I was thinking that about the ship, or myself.
I hiked out of the sloshy muck onto a bank and twirled around to take in the entirety of the swamp. Mighty trees with knotty spurs surrounded me like walls on a coliseum. A tapestry of intricate vine growth, random lush patches of grass, and fuzzy multi-colored moss, draped over everything not covered in sloshy muck. It was huge and wild and intensely intimate. Nature at her most raw, most exposed.
Artie waited for me to take a few steps away from the ship before he followed me out. I think he was feeling a little guilty, usually he wouldn't allow me to record my findings without interruption like this.
"Have you ever seen a gnarltree this size?" I spread my arms wide at the tower of timber before me. "This place is like a treasure trove. See how the sporophytes on that moss grows only on the north-facing side of those tuber roots? And look at the size of those buds! They must be two feet in diameter fully bloomed. Incredible, this is an incredible ecosystem. Can you feel it? The energy in the air, it's almost electric."
Artie did not respond as he circled the bank of the swamp to head further inland toward the tree line.
"It's like that radiating feeling from back on Tatooine. Or in Pop's hut, you were there, remember? Warm and dense but not everywhere like a change in the weather. It's pointed. I feel like if I move quickly enough, I could escape the feeling, but then it would just catch up to me anyway."
"You're rambling." He spun his head back and forth, taking it all in with me. A little satellite receiver popped out of the top of his head and began to spin round and round. His motors spooled up and hummed to boost the scan.
The ten year old me would have seen this bog as a playgarden. I used to love to climb trees and rocks, skin my knees and come home late with a whole new set of bruises and stories to match them. But the grownup, doctoral fellow Mary, stood in awe of life's indelible capacity on Dagobah.
"Everywhere you look is swamp and jungle—" I felt a catch in my breath. "But there is such beauty in it. It's almost as if someone designed this place to be both uninviting and sheltering in equal measure. Nature has so much to teach us."
"Biologicals—" Artie whistled. "Everything is a miracle to your kind."
I wiped a tear or two from the corners of my eyes, and chuckled. "I was starting to wonder if you'd ever interrupt my blathering."
Artie whistled and whined and then stopped to stare at the middle of the swampy pond we were circumnavigating. It took me a step or two to realize it, but I followed him to see a cairn of jagged, overgrown stones jutting up out of the center of the bog. They appeared haphazardly stacked, yet weathered as though they've been there for decades.
"Can you scan it?" I asked, but he already had and found nothing but stone and fungi, as well as a clutch of crustaceans using it as an apartment building.
"Curious," I said when he finished whistling.
We started moving again and continued around the waterline toward the north. After a few minutes of trekking through the mist and endless jungle, we found what we came for. There stood a squat, meager clay hut built into the roots of a dying gnarltree. I paused when I first espied it, nervousness battling it out with curiosity for control of my extremities.
Artie rolled past me, beeping excitedly that I had better hurry up, or he would take credit for anything he discovered. That seemed to snap me out of it.
I sucked in a big, deep breath—the kind I wouldn't usually take on a foreign world—and felt a tingling get stuck in the back of my mind. I closed my eyes to try to experience it more clearly: it felt like I drank a little too much caff, but didn't have to pee yet. I was wired but focused, yet not exactly calm enough to make rational decisions.
Artie was watching and probably thought I was losing my mind.
"Say something and I'll turn you into a refrigeration unit," I said with a raised eyebrow.
He whistled and whined at me while I blew raspberries back, but we both fell silent when we approached the hut door. It was like stepping up to a gravity well. Some invisible power that turned trepidation into resilience and ideas into actions, pulled me down to my knees and through the tiny threshold of the hut.
Artie let out a series of anxious tones as he followed me but stopped in the doorway. He turned on a lamp to help my datapad illuminate the cramped, earthen space.
"Damn it. How small was this Master Yoda?" I said, annoyed that the roof was too low for me to do anything but sit with my legs crossed or crawl on all fours. The clay hut was built right into the tree trunk and used the thick, tendril-like roots as a frame. "Grandmaster of the Jedi Order, and he must have been shorter than you. And look at this place, not a piece of technology in here. Just a lot of mud and leaves. Maybe grave-robbers?"
But Artie did not agree. I could see the lights whirring and his processors ramping up to fill the hut with an excited, spinning sound. "What is it? You okay buddy?"
Suddenly his lamp cut off for a moment, then projected a holographic image of a black safe identical to the one hidden in the foundation of Pop's house, onto the face of the tree trunk beside me. Artie rolled under a large root that appeared as a shelf on a wall, then turned toward a recessed knot in the tree trunk.
I shifted off my backside and onto my knees so I could watch.
The holo-image spun and shifted until it fit perfectly within the recess. Artie tooted out a tune that made me want to yell out, "charge!" He pulled out a drill and buzz-saw from his multifarious compartments and began cutting into the raw wood.
"You're a genius," I said to him as he made short work of the gnarltree trunk. Artie beeped that I was finally starting to make some sense to him. He attached a tow cable with a rubber suction cup to the black-iron safe and wrenched on it. It would not budge.
After a while of failing at that, he went back to sawing till he completely exposed the front panel and excavated a wide enough berth around the edges to free it. Still the safe would not come out. Artie was getting frustrated, so I intervened.
"Why don't you take a break?" I said and placed my palm on his dome head. "Let me see what I can do. You've been having all the fun since we got here, anyway."
Artie recanted his opinion about my having good sense, and gurgled out a few other mean things about the contents of my head, but relented and rolled away all the same.
"It almost feels electrified…" The words escaped my lips as a whisper, but I did not consciously know why I was trailing off like that. As my hand got closer to the metal plate, I felt the tingling grow and reach out to me like static electricity. "What is that? Can you feel that, too?"
He did not reply, but watched me intently.
I placed my hand on the blank metal surface and a blast of super-hot electric current shot through my hand, up my arm and into my chest. I screamed and kicked my legs at the tree. With a strenuous pull I heaved myself free from the arresting, burning shock. My eyes went dark, gravity turned over and over again; I felt a crushing impact in my spine and finally, mercifully lost consciousness.
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"The Force, these stories, it's all too important to be forgotten."
"Pop," I shouted, "it's me, Mary. Pop, where are you? I can hear you, but I can't see you. Can you hear me?"
"Believers and non-believers, neither is ready for the truth, but all deserve it."
"I want to understand, Pop, please, I'm trying so hard. Don't leave me alone, not again."
"Trusting in the Force is hard. Sometimes I wish it was someone else's duty..."
" I chose the side of Science not can you trust in the Force? Still? After all it's taken from us?"
"I've always known my faith would cost me my life."
"Maybe you have always known that, but I was a little girl who needed her grandfather. I needed you—Mum needed you. How can this all be worth it?"
"Hope," the voice of Lor San Tekka echoed through my head and rattled my body like the earth was crumbling beneath me.
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I woke up from the dream in a cold sweat and instantly felt two things that made me wish I had stayed asleep: A massive headache, and a burning throughout my arm and shoulder.
"How am I not dead?" I asked through Artie's alternating whistles of relief and disappointment. "I know, I know, of course I shouldn't have touched that with my bare hand. No, not all xenopsychs are as dumb as I am. How'd you get me back on the ship? How long was I out for?"
Artie told me it was nearly two Standard days since my stupid mistake in Yoda's hut. The med-scanner found the nerve endings in my right arm in bad shape, but nothing a long bacta session could not cure. I asked him about the safe and the hut, but he just told me I need to rest and wouldn't answer my questions. The stubborn droid numbed and bandaged my arm, then left me to fall back into fitful, yet dreamless sleep shortly thereafter.
When I finally woke again I felt like a new woman. Artie had a cup of junnberry waiting for me, alongside a butter loaf he had procured from a Nabooian dough puncher, and some ginger-beans fresh foraged from the Dagobah jungle. I scarfed them down in a couple bites, then, after taking a long while in the refreshing stall, joined Artie in the hold.
He seemed pleased to see me—even if he did not say so—and told me to sit down.
"So, I notice that we're in space," I said. "I am hoping that's for a good reason?"
Artie launched into a tirade about the lengths he goes to for me, but eventually calmed down enough to explain all that had happened during my short coma. After towing me from the hut and getting me stabilized, Artie found that the exposed faceplate of the safe was no longer bare. A keyhole had appeared just like the one back on Andara. Only this one was not analog, it required a digital key.
He could not find a way to take the safe out of the tree without cutting the tree down entirely. Then he informed me that there was no way he could cut down the tree without burying the safe beneath the wreckage. It was an impasse.
"So you just left it there? We have to go back. This is my grandfather's legacy, my research, our research—" The droid remained unmoved. I took a deep breath, realizing how shrill I had just become. "I'm sorry, I think I'm still tired."
"I opened the safe," he beeped to me. "Actually, we opened it. You, your mother and your grandfather included." He extended an arm from his central compartment and produced the Zaetech datachip on the end of my mother's necklace. I tilted my head before realizing that it was the key to the Yoda's safe. "You'll never believe what I found."
Suddenly a image flared to life between me and Artie. It was a silver and gold dodecahedron, with bulbs of what looked like glass eyes in the center of each face. The twelve-sided figure rested in the center of the cradle that we had retrieved from AJ on Coruscant.
"You're right—" I said, my chin against my chest. "I don't believe it. Is that what I think it is?"
A holo-image of the Great Holocron of the Jedi Order was glowing with streams of yellowish gold, flowing up and down through the braces of the cradle.
"G.H.C.-001, the Great Holocron of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant," Artie intoned, then insisted there was more. He brought me onto a new rubber mat that covered the back half of the cargo deck. It was thick and black; Artie explained that it was just one of a number of new precautions he had set up since meeting Mother Talzin. "Lost for nearly three quarters of a century. Now, it sits in our hold."
Artie explained that the Intentus was attempting to plumb the largest archive of galactic history and the Jedi religion. He hooked it into the cradle and the algorithm was learning more from by the hour. A panel in the wall behind his workstation swung open to reveal the cradle and the holocron. Five screens surrounded the relic and a webwork of dozens and dozens of fiber-optic lines ran into and out of it.
It was merely a matter of patience—the heart of good science—Artie explained as he busily sorted through the contents of an armored locker.
"It's magnificent," I said to him as I watched the glowing Jedi artifact send golden lines of data into the ship's computer. "How long do you think it will take?"
He said there was no telling, but he was uplinked to the computer's data-miner, so the moment the Intentus finished cracked the holocron, we would know.
Then he rolled away from the back lockers, off of the rubber floor mat and over to the workstation. I was transfixed on the glowing Jedi artifact, and felt waves of that warm, tingling glow radiate all over me. My arm even seemed to hurt a little less. But then Artie beeped something about what he really wanted to show me, and I managed to peel my eyes away.
What he retrieved did not disappointment. He pulled out an awkward, tarnished gold object that was about the size of a Wookiee's fist. The thing was covered in thumbnail-sized plates that looked like a suit of armor with tiny, indecipherable scrawling on it. Artie it down on the table then plugged into the multi-port so he could maneuver his trio of mechanical arms.
"Is that another holocron?" I asked, but knew the answer. Artie beeped approvingly. Yoda had had more than one secret in his possession. The droid spun around to look right at me as he said that he was waiting for me to open it. "Thanks buddy, you're a good friend. You don't know how much this all means to me."
"Yes I do," he said back. "You're the best scientist I've ever worked with, Doctor Mary."
With the three omni-arms at Artie's command, he pulled the fiber optic mesh over the golden relic—marked H.C.R.-002—in the same manner as the trio we found back on Andara. He whistled while the arms pulled the mesh taught. A monitor displayed a scroll of endless lines of data, signaling that the Intentus was ready. The mesh illuminated and began transmitting the unlocking algorithm all around the gilded frame.
I came to my senses and activated my datapad's recording module just in time.
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