Note: Thanks so much for the reviews! They encourage me to keep going, which can be a gift in and of itself as finals roll around for Law School. Sometimes you need a little extra encouragement to keep studying the intricacies that are the interplay between state and federal rules of civil procedure . . . yuck.

Chapter 10: Hot and Cold

The emergency hatch was not the most welcoming opening she'd ever seen. The airlock itself was standard, but the actual access tunnel itself was tiny, no larger than the emergency access tunnels on a starship, only straight down. More relevantly, the round tunnel was just barely wider than her shoulders. The lights in the tunnel were out, dropping the tiny hole into pitch blackness.

Marina swallowed hard. Well, there was nothing else for it.

She swung her feet over the edge and grabbed the wrought iron handles welded to the tunnel wall. She shivered as the ice-cold metal touched her skin. Either the heating system had been knocked out by the explosion or, more likely, had never extended to cover the emergency access ways.

Rung by rung she descended into the darkness. Her senses slowly closed down. There was nothing to see, nothing to break the oppressive silence aside from the ragged sounds of her breathing. It wasn't long before she was shaking from head to toes, and she clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. It was so cold, so very cold. The kind of cold that made it a force of will to keep from curling into a ball of shaking misery. The cold of space.

She kept going.

Eventually the cold lost its bite and her back muscles slowly unclenched. But it kept getting warmer, warmer, until sweat started to drip down her face. The palms of her hands grew slick on the rungs. Somehow she felt both lightheaded and a headache at the same time with the rapid change in temperature. The heat grew still more intense, making the air shimmer, making it hard to breath.

She reached the bottom of the shaft and kicked open the release valve on the hatch which dropped away into the mining tunnel. A roar of pressurized hot air burst through the emergency access way and she howled as it burned her exposed arms and legs. It was too hot to hold onto the metal handles; she let go instinctively and dropped straight into the furnace.

The deck plate was scalding, burning the bottoms of her feet even worse while she did an awkward dance from foot to foot. No good. She jumped forward onto the raw asteroid rock. It was hot, but not as bad as the scalding metal. The whole cavern shimmered with heat, making her eyes water and her throat burn with each gasping breath. She coughed on the smoky air while her light-headedness grew worse in the oxygen-sapped air.

She wouldn't last long down here.

Marina started moving forward, her feet sinking into the half-melted gravel that stuck to her bare skin. She coughed into her forearm, trying to block out the smoke.

There! No . . . she thought she saw . . . yes, there was a pulsing light up ahead. Marina forced her legs to move more quickly, to fight the sticky ground, the exhaustion, the hunger. The light came into view – it was a warning klaxon, it's sound distant over the hissing of steam and the rumble of shifting asteroid rock. It was a life pod, an emergency shelter. It looked like a silver, oversized coffin with about the internal space of a small refresher station. She half-stepped inside when something on the ground caught her eye. She blinked rapidly, ignoring the burning, trying to see clearly. It was a body. Yes, now she could hear the hydraulics of a droid moving inside.

Marina was coughing non-stop now, eyes so blurry she could hardly see, hardly breathe. She drew her makeshift blaster and charged, firing blindly into the shelter. She could hear the full-powered mining lasers return fire but couldn't make out the shots. Two steps in she tripped on something on the floor and went down hard. The air left her lungs in a rush, the impact knocking the wind out of her.

Marina fought for her life there in the dirt of a small corner of a mining tunnel, orbiting a planet most didn't even know existed, and would have ignored even if they'd known. It would be easy to die here, never to be heard of, not to be missed.

She fought anyways.

Marina was suffocating, unable to take in any oxygen with her feeble, tiny gasps. She couldn't hear, couldn't see, couldn't think. Her hands wandered without conscious thought in a desperate, hopeless bid for survival.

They found something.

The body she'd tripped over, there was a hose on it. She yanked it towards her quickly, heard something hissing, felt cool air against her face, struggled with the cheap transparent plastic that felt so heavy, pulled it over her head, through her snarled hair, fought it into position . . .

Air.

There was air.

She slumped to the deck and moved no more.

Kreia contemplated while she watched. The girl struggled, floundered about in pain and confusion, as much beneath the conscious mind as within it, but the old woman did not move, did not reach out a hand to the little girl a second time.

Tension, almost more than she could stand, thrummed through her entire being, but she forced her body to stay calm and still. This time, these precious seconds, were the critical moments of her plans, of her life's work. This would mark the beginning of her endeavors, but only if it worked. And, as with all great moments, Kreia faced it sooner than she'd expected, and with a shadow of her former strength.

It would be enough. It had to be.

Her presence hovered near that of the lost one, the survivor, and waited as her consciousness abandoned her. Still she watched, awaiting the perfect moment. Waiting.

Now.

You are dying. Your lungs are too clouded with smoke and dust to breath.

Alarm.

The response was no voice, no rational being. It was a consciousness, powerful and simple. Kreia held her peace, waiting silently. Ah, now there was something more. Now there was fear.

I cannot save you as I have before. I can not give you my Force, my strength, again. But you can be saved. Open yourself to the Force as you did to survive during the horrors of war, as you did on the dark surface of Malachor 5.

FEAR. Refusal.

She was so close, so close! No, calmly, carefully. Focus. She chose her thoughts with care.

There is . . . another way. You sense me, my presence. My Force can save you. Take it.

Confusion. Hesitation.

It is alright. Take it.

Wavering.

Take it!

…

Defeat.

Marina gasped and snapped upright. The reflex was instantly overcome by an even stronger one; her diaphragm contracted so strongly she folded forward like she'd been kicked in the stomach, and she coughed the hard, deep cough that scrapes the raw sides of your lungs and throat like an ice-cream scoop dragged on concrete. Phlegm, black with dust, splattered the inside of her oxygen mask.

She lasted three smaller coughs before her diaphragm contracted again as her body expelled what it could not overcome.

Though it felt like an eternity, eventually the spasming stopped. She lay face-down on the rock where she'd collapsed as her coughing subsided, completely drained. Red and black spittle lined her lips, filled her mouth, dripped down her chin where it combined with the snot that ran from her nose.

She wanted to wipe off her face, to wash the gross sickness out of her mouth, but she couldn't remove the oxygen mask, not if she didn't want to go through this again.

She shuddered at the thought.

Her breathing was still shallow and quick, and each breath hurt, but she could breathe. If she could breathe she could move. If she could move, she could leave and never come come back to this awful place.

Marina blinked several times rapidly, hoping the mess of both reflex tears and real tears would help her see a little more clearly. The body she'd fallen over was that of a young man, maybe twenty or so years old. He lay half on top of the mining droid that had killed him, the same one that had tried to finish her off, pinning it there by his weight and the small confines of the emergency shelter. The man had died of a massive blow to the head so powerful it had knocked off his oxygen mask. Either the blow had killed him or he'd been knocked unconscious and asphyxiated. Pleasant thought. But now he also sported two holes in the back of his jacket thanks to Marina's blind fire, which had also taken out the droid he'd thoughtfully held in place for her. Unfortunately, that wasn't all she'd hit.

Some delicate-looking machinery she couldn't see clearly enough to identify had long black streaks along it now and sparked fitfully. Hopefully it still worked. She reached out and pulled the big red lever that had "Activate" stenciled on it.

The doors of the self-contained life pod rattled and moved a dozen centimeters or so before sliding back open again.

::Warning. Warning. System failure. Activation overridden.::

What? Her thoughts were sluggish and muddled. Was it just broken, or had it really been overridden? Well, it didn't matter much right now. Later, she'd sort it out later.

She slid to the floor again and leaned back against the life pod's wall. Okay, what could she use?

The pod was small, little more than a one-woman cage designed to protect the occupant for a couple of days in case of emergency. That meant . . . air? Food?

There were two lockers inset into the walls. She gave one a tug but it refused to budge. There was writing on it, but . . . she blinked, squinted, and started to piece it together.

Activate Pod to open.

Damn it.

There was nothing for her here, except . . . she glanced down at the dead man at her feet. Unlike most of the others, he'd been killed by impact, not by lasers. His clothes should still be mostly intact instead of torn-up, bloody rags.

It was harder work than she'd thought stripping him and putting on his clothes. Bodies were always so much heavier than you expected. She'd unclipped the belt-mounted compressed oxygen tank from him and pulled off his heavy flame-retardant jacket without too much difficulty despite the awkward confines, but the shirt proved harder, especially because she'd tried to avoid looking at the unnatural dent in the side of his skull.

The shirt was designed for a man, uncomfortably squashing her chest and hanging too loosely from there down, but it wasn't her underwear, that was the key thing. And as a bonus, being designed for men and their fat necks meant she could squeeze the oxygen tank through the neck opening so she didn't have to have the hose poking out from under her shirt. It offered little protection from the heat and it rubbed across the bright-red exposed skin of her arms. She definitely had some burns there.

Eventually she got the pants off. They were loose, but at least the man had had enough sense to wear a belt. Finally came the socks and heavy boots. She took the time to try to scrape off as much of the half-melted asteroid rock stuck to the bottoms of her feet as she could before tossing a hope to the stars that the man hadn't had any sort of strange fungus before pulling them on. Even laced as tight as she could pull them they were still loose. Hopefully she would find replacements before she blistered too badly.

She felt almost human again wearing clothes, however ill-fitting. In fact, she felt better than she had any right to feel, given the circumstances. Not good by any stretch, but . . . no. She hadn't used it again while she was out, had she?

Marina cut off the thought before she could start panicking. This was definitely not the time for it. She shoved the corpse to the side of the pod to give her a little more space, but mostly just to be doing something instead of thinking. He half-rolled over and Marina got a look at his face which she'd tried to avoid. His expression was locked in a moment of shock and surprise, but what caught her attention were the goggles over his eyes. They were heavy, the polarized lenses stretching clear across his face. She pulled them off, wincing as she tugged it loose from the crushed part of his skull. Not much of the blood came out of the wrap-around stretch fabric when she scraped it against his bone-white skin. It was stained in.

She tried not to think about that as she pulled the band over head and settled the goggles over her eyes. Oh the sweet relief! Her eyes relaxed a little from the constant strain and irritation. They still teared up, making it hard to see, but hopefully it would start getting better now.

Speaking of which, these were actually powered goggles. She toggled the on-off switch near her right temple and a display popped up. It was an explosives trace detector, the likes of which were used by transit security personnel in spaceports across the galaxy. They weren't nearly as powerful as the military versions designed to find stealthed mines like she'd seen during . . . before.

Still, they would work. Which was both a good and a bad thing, she supposed. Good because she could make out whatever explosives the miners were using, bad because if the bad guys had figured out how to make the droids use mining lasers like blasters they sure as the galactic core could make them use explosives.

The oxygen tank buzzed a warning and she checked the capacity levels. They were near zero. The thing hadn't magically shut off when the man died, and she repressed a curse. She really didn't want to be moving, or thinking about, her mouth right then. She was lucky there'd been any air left at all. Most oxygen tanks weren't designed to keep miners trapped for days like this one.

Time to move.

Marina slid her mining laser into the designed holster on the man's belt and transferred her plasma cutter a little more awkwardly, then pulled on the heavy jacket. It irritated her burns, but would hopefully keep them from getting worse.

The mining tunnel was as oppressive as ever, though not nearly as uncomfortable as before. Her eyes had mostly cleared up though they still stung, which meant she had a little bit of a better view of what she was facing.

This seemed to be a primary shaft. All along the sides other smaller shafts broke off, but their emergency seals had dropped to contain the explosion. No getting through those, even if she'd wanted to. No, her goal was to get to the dormitories which were on the other side of the station. Somewhere on the far side of this tunnel would be a way to transport fuel up to the fuel depot, which would have access to the rest of the station. If she was lucky, it would just be the administration deck that was locked down and she could just take the turbolift. If not, well, she'd have to force her way up the loading mechanism somehow. She was on the clock with her oxygen, no time to stick around.

Walking down the tunnel left Marina with a surreal feeling. The hiss of pressurized air, the rumble of shifting rock, it was quiet now beneath the soft whisper of oxygen being pumped into the oxygen mask that was more of a helmet than a mask. The goggles she'd placed over the front of her mask lit up, highlighting a squarish rig on the wall that shifted to stay highlighted as she turned her head. So the thing was keyed to the emergency systems as well as explosives. Convenient.

She crunched her way over asteroid dust to take a closer look. It was a com relay.

Wow. This technology was ancient; instead of boosting the signal power on their receivers to punch through the asteroid, or changing to another wave type that could move through it, they'd installed this little guy to receive signals and transfer it by wire to the other end, where the relay there would toss it back out as a com signal. No wonder she hadn't heard from Atton. There wasn't bad reception down here, there was no reception unless you synced in with the relay. She reached under her mask and gave the sync button on her commlink a tap. The unit gave a confirmation tone in her ear.

"Atton, can you hear me?"

…

"They're using an old relay system. Sync up with the receiver there, it's probably built into the admin console."

After a few moments Atton's voice spoke into ear. She was just a tiny bit relieved to hear from another living person, or at least one that wasn't super creepy with a bad habit for probing into things best left alone. Like Marina.

::Hey, you realize you've been down there for almost an hour without making contact? I was almost starting to think about getting worried about you.::

Marina was in no mood to play games, and her moment of gratitude slipped away. "There are droids down here. Can you get a lock on to how many there are?"

Thankfully, Atton got the message and dropped the attitude. ::I've narrowed down some of the ID signatures and it looks like there are a lot of them, but they're hard to pin down. I'm picking up a lot of interference, plus most of the sensor systems went down in the blast that sent everyone running for the hills. The good news is that I've been looking into these droids, and it seems that their detection systems are basically just glorified thermal imaging, so they should have a harder time picking you out down there.::

"Good to know. I also found some clothes down here."

::Dammit . . . I mean good, that's good. No point in having you running around half-naked down there. It was distracting, you know . . . for the droids.::

Marina could almost see the wink on his smug little face.

"Oh shut up. I mentioned it because it's some kind of protective mining gear, but I don't see how it'd be enough protection by itself from a blast."

Atton took a few moments to respond. ::I've got it. The miners had rechargeable heat shields. Very energy intensive ones, it looks like. Normally they offer passive, low-level heat protection, but they have an emergency, single-pulse burnout in case of explosions. Take a look around, see if you can find one. And Marina?::

"Yeah?"

::Good luck down there.::

Marina gave an all-clear double click into the com and started moving again. It only took a few minutes before her survey goggles picked up a series of sonic mines. Sonic? Oh, right, to avoid blowing the whole place. The field of coverage was weird though, like someone had tried to teach the droids how to have proper military coverage then gave up half-way through. She scanned the rest of the tunnel. There didn't seem to be any droids, but they couldn't be far. The trio of dead miners further up the tunnel attested to that.

Actually seeing the proximity triggers on her display made picking her way through the minefield a straightforward, if delicate, proposition. The miners, on the other hand, hadn't been so lucky. A fried sonic mine at their feet painted a picture of what had happened here. They'd been caught by surprised by the mine where it wasn't supposed to be, and the droids had gotten on them before they could recover. They hadn't even had time to activate their heat shields, fortunately for Marina. The other miner, the one by the pod, must have used his up trying to get away.

Marina slotted one of the shields into a pocket built into the mining gear's wrist and put the other two into her pocket before moving on. She was getting close now, almost through. Just a few more . . . of course. It would be right before she made it that she would run into a problem.

There was a massive pile of rock with a single hole, glowing bright red and billowing clouds of steam.

"Uh, Atton? You seeing this?"

His voice replied instantly.

::You mean that massive pile of rock blocking the tunnel? Yeah, hang on. Alright, so it looks like this section of the tunnel collapsed, but it's not very far to the other side. Can you force your way through?::

Marina took a step closer and could actually feel the air temperature rise through her heavy protective gear. She keyed her com again. "I don't think so Atton. I think this section actually collapsed before the explosion, not because of it. The hot air needed somewhere to go, and the rock gave out before the duracrete, so it punched a hole through the faults in the rock structure." This seemed . . . familiar almost. Like she'd seen it somewhere before. "Atton, what's on the other side of this?"

::Let's see. There's some sort of larger cavern back there. It's not the lift mechanism for pulling out raw deposits, I can see that a little further ahead. I'm not sure what's in there, but it's drawing a lot of power. In fact, it looks like droids are moving towards it . . . a lot of droids.::

Marina tried to snap her fingers, but it didn't work too well in the heavy jacket's gloves. "That's it. My credits are on that being the droid central control platform. It's gotta be down here somewhere if their com systems are so bad they can't just run them all remotely, and it makes sense to keep it close to their main work areas. It explains why this passage was collapsed early. If you were hijacking a station's droids and then forcing a lockdown by triggering an explosion down here, you'd want to make damn sure you didn't fry the droid control center while you did it."

::Assuming you're right, what do you want to do about it?::

"I don't know. Let me think about it."

We are running short on time, young one. Let the Force guide you, give you the speed and strength to move quickly past these machines.

"No, now get out of my head! I don't want to use it!"

::What? I didn't say anything!::

"Not you, Rand, now shut up, I'm trying to think."

The oxygen tank gave another ominous buzz. The indicator was all thew ay on zero. Frak, she had no choice. Wait . . . unless . . .

Marina holstered her mining laser and pulled out her two spare heat shields, one in each hand, then activated the emergency burnout on the shield on her wrist. With that she charged the tunnel.

The crack in the asteroid had acted as a sort of compressor, forcing more and more hot air into a narrow space until it became so hot it had cracked the rest of the way through, but that meant this rock was hot. Really hot.

Sweat poured down her body. With every step her feet stuck to the floor and pulled off with a squelch as the composite boot soles melted. She worried her clothes would catch fire while she watched her oxygen mask melt, dripping scalding plastic onto her face. The shield sputtered and gave out, and for a split second she was on fire.

Then she was through.

An array of mining droids was waiting for her, protectively arrayed around a large center console. Marina activated the shields in both hands and flicker her wrists forward, sending the little devices sailing towards that control console. Dozens of mining lasers flashed, each half-second pulse futilely trying to track those little energy shields working away on overdrive. One of the shields fell short and bounced along the deck, but the other landed right on top of it. And if you could give droids credit for anything, it was their persistence. They fired away mercilessly until the console was a molten, slagged mess, and as one the droids shuddered to a stop.

Marina wasn't watching, however. Instead she took those moments to whip off her flaming jacket. Her teeth clenched in a half-snarl of agony as her hands pulled the melting mask off her face, taking the now-fused goggles with it. Burn marks trailed down her face like tears, and the two holes in the back of her jacket were now matched by two holes in her shirt revealing blistered burns.

It's over, you're through, it's over. And somehow, again, she wasn't dead. Which was a small mercy, as laying down and dying didn't sound so bad right then. But no rest for the weary.

::What the hell did you just do down there? The containment fields are all shutting down. Once those go the hardwired safety protocols kick in and they vent the tunnels into space so fuel doesn't get into the rest of the station. You need to get out of there, now!::

Marina groaned and forced herself into motion.

She could see the turbolift, but it was so far . . . so far.

She staggered onwards, weaving like a a roaring drunk, while new alarms wailed.

Twenty steps left.

The containment fields popped like overcharged fuses so fast they sounded like a heavy repeater opening up on full auto.

Ten steps left.

Explosive charges blew in carefully timed sequence, blowing the heavy blast doors open on all the containment tubes venting fuel into the chamber. The fumes hit Marina like a twenty-ton combat assault shuttle, sending her staggering. She couldn't breathe.

Five steps left.

Another explosion, bigger and closer this time, punched a hole in the duracrete ceiling. Her ill-fitting shirt and pants flapped violently as air whipped past her.

Two steps.

She could feel herself starting to lift off the deck. This was it! Marina launched herself forward into the open lift and latched onto the doorway with both hands. A mining droid careened off the wall and slammed into her. She gasped as something broke inside her and a hand slipped.

Marina whipped around like a starship trying to escape a gravity well, catching a glimpse of cold space while fuel, droids, bodies, and more were hurled out to the stars. Sonic mines ripped free of their deck mounts and exploded in a mad cacophony of sound as they flew into walls, airborne droids, and each other.

Marina hooked her other hand back over the doorway again and pulled with all her might, fighting the drag of vacuum, of the hours of tense, creeping fear, of exhaustion, of a past full of despair, and with a scream she hauled her sorry ass into the lift and hit the button.

::Marina? Marina!?::

::Can you hear me?::

::Talk to me, are you alright?::

And then, at last, there was silence.

The fuel depot was silent as the grave. It had been this way for two days now; no hum of conversations, no gentle scrapes of chairs pushed in. Silence.

The ping of an arriving turbolift echoed through the quiet, while the door slid aside with a small swish. It was almost never heard, but here, now, it sounded loud. Inside the lift nothing moved.

The arrival was not unnoticed.

Power surged through circuits, locomotion algorithms woke from their sleep, and two red lights blinked on, curious to see the new arrival.