Off the Grid


Chapter 4

"This thing is a piece of trash," Anakin Skywalker complained bitterly from the passenger compartment aboard the antique mining tug. He spoke in a near whisper, lest their pilot overhear. The old man sat at the helm, guiding the tug ponderously through the asteroid field and into the nebula proper.

"Yes, but she's so reliable," Obi Wan reminded him dryly.

"She better be. I don't think I've ever seen a schematic for one of these things. Even in Watto's junk shop. This ship must be older even than our friend up there. Bet he scrounged it off some junkheap when he was young."

"It is functional – and hopefully it will afford us an undetected entry onto that refueling station."

"Yeah," Anakin reluctantly agreed, as the miner pushed the reluctant sluggish Betsy to her full sublight capacity. The young Jedi rolled his eyes. This had to be the slowest piece of poodoo he had ever been aboard, including that disintegrating jalope of a sail barge he and Obi Wan had hijacked on Xolinth on those years ago. Betsy lurched toward the nearest proto-star and its huge, gaseous satellites like a drunken bantha.

Anakin had spent the duration of the ion storm making a few small adjustments to the miner's busted vaporator and then installing the stolen security codes into Betsy's antiquated transponder. Obi Wan had pored over their host's outdated mining holo-maps, trying to correlate the modern last-launch coordinates taken from the droid fighter with the old polar coordinate system employed by the early miners. He had concluded that the station must be located on one of the abandoned platforms near the first gas giant's equator.

As they penetrated deeper into the Triburon Ghost Nebula, marveling at the pink and gold marbling of the looming planet's ever-changing surface – or outermost layer – Obi Wan stepped forward to the console and entered the new coordinates into Betsy's simple navigation system. "The computer here doesn't seem to have an automatic recalculation feature. If that platform has drifted very far since the droid fighter departed, we will have to find it the hard way," he frowned.

"Great," Anakin griped. "I hate playing hide and seek. How many more fighters do you think they'll send out to keep us company? In case you hadn't noticed, Betsy here doesn't have any functional weapons."

"Then we must hope that transponder code you discovered works," Obi Wan told him flatly.

They dipped beneath the topmost layer of the gas giant's atmosphere, into an eerie world of pink and gold fog. "Aaaaaah," the prospectot sighed. "Makes me feel at home agin." The thick soupy gases danced and shifted around them on every side, enchanting and disconcerting. Betsy's console lit up with an old fashioned gravity compass display.

"There you are," her pilot grinned. "Keep yer eye on that, youngsters, an' ye won't get lost out here. Down's down, even in the soup."

"That's helpful. We'll know which way to fall in case we have to crash," Anakin grumbled.

"Ain't nothing to crash into," the old miner reminded him. It was true; theoretically, this planet might have no solid matter core whatsoever. And none of them was interested in verifying the question empirically.

"We should be along the equator now," Obi Wan said, leaning over the old man's shoulder as the tug dropped another few thousand meters in a long, steady descent. A storm picked up and thrashed the fog and gas into violent contortions – but Betsy did little more than shudder slightly despite the violent onslaught.

"Our trusty steed begins to prove her worth," Obi Wan commented.

"Damn right she does," the prospector agreed.

Anakin nodded. "I'd hate to take a lighter ship down through this mess, especially if we hit an electrical storm."

"Really? I would have thought that was precisely your idea of fun."

"Suicide is not the Jedi way, master."

Another thousand meters down and they left the worst of the storm behind. But at this depth, visibility beyond the cockpit was next to nothing. The miner slowed their lumbering vessel almost to a crawl, as dark twisted shapes loomed suddenly out of the thick magenta and orange clouds, like vast skeletal shipwrecks rising from a foggy sea and then sinking back again.

"Mining platforms," Obi Wan breathed, gazing out the viewport in fascination. Some of them had been colossal – cities in their own right; some were the size of large asteroids. All were mangled and bent, enormous beams and crossbeams thrusting from their ruins like strangling scarecrow hands.

"The storms must have ripped them to pieces once the shielding systems were shut down," Anakin guessed, watching the ghostly parade of derelict platforms pass by one after another. The prospector steered Betsy in a long starboard loop as another misshapen platform appeared before them, keening wildly to one side.

Obi Wan closed his eyes in concentration, blocking out the eerie spactacle. "It's nearby," he said after a moment. "There's a disturbance in the Force…straight ahead, I think."

Anakin flet the chill travel down his spine, too; the cold sense of a secret revealed. He reached over to the comm. array and began sending a pulse transmission of the security code, requesting clearance to land.

In a moment, the veils of pale color parted to reveal yet another platform – more massive, more sprawling than any they had yet seen. Alight with points of fire which were windows, operating lights, repulsor fields, shield generators, it rose in tiers about a vast tibanna processing processing plant in the very center of its lowest level. Balanced in midair like some gaudy child's top, it dwarfed Betsy to an invisible speck and sent a palpable wave of menace through the Force.

"We found it," Anakin whispered in grim satisfaction.

The old miner just stared.


"Sir," one of the standard utility droids manning the communications console said. "A vessel registering the security code from our missing starfighter is requesting permission to land."

TX88's motivators whirred into life. "Confirm vessel identity," he commanded from his position at the hub of the busy control center. All such information had to be made by coded signal; the tritium outside jammed visual scanners and energy readings alike.

"Identity confirmed," the droid droned. "Magnafighter 66B returning from assignment. Data files indicate 66B lost in action. Update and correct files?"

"No. Do not update files. Allow vessel clearance to land in maintenance bay four," TX88 decided.

"Incoming vessel docking in bay four," the moronic utility droid reported.

"Very good," TX88 told his pathetic underling. "Stand by for further orders," he announced to the automated crew on the deck. A chorus of roger roger roger rose from the droids stationed below and around him in a wide circle.

TX88 rubbed his metallic hands together. "Ha ha ha ha ha," he chuckled electronically. "Welcome, Jedi." With a cybernetic twinge of pleasure, he noted that his prediction was only 4.1 minutes shy of complete accuracy.


"That was easy," Anakin grinned.

"I'll be damned to the nine hells," the old prospector muttered, looking through the viewport at the maintenance bay's interior. "Who woulds thought? Now what are we doin', boys?"

"You," Obi Wan ordered sternly, "Are staying here, preferably in one of those smuggling hatches in the hold. If we do not return within two standard hours, take off without us and return to your home. Understood?"

The miner shook his head. "Yer as mad as a gundark, youngster. I don't run when the goin' gets tough."

The Jedi raised an eyebrow. "I thought this was none of your affair."

"It ain't," the old man sniffed. "But you ain't my boss, neither. So lay off yer haughty tone and be on yer way. I'll make my own call about when's the time to leave."

Obi Wan ground his teeth, but Anakin tugged at his sleeve and pulled him toward the exit hatch in the stern of the ship. There was no use arguing with an old coot like the prospector. He had learned that much during his years as a slave on Tatooine. Within moments, the two Jedi had dashed from the relative cover of the boarding ramp, across the polished deck of the hangar bay, and then behind a stack of utility crates. Mice droids and automated cranes and arms whirred and hummed around the mining tug's hull, clearly unsure why magnafighter 66B had returned from its aborted mission in such a different shape and size.

"That'll jam the maintenance system," Anakin observed. "They'll send someone down to look at it. Probably another droid. I don't sense anything living in this place. Do you?"

Obi Wan shook his head. "No. It's the blind leading the blind. That makes our job easier. We need to locate a schematic of this station and then determine the best way to shut the whole thing down."

"Schematics…" Anakin mused. "Wish we had brought Artoo. I don't think I can hack into a CIS database without him."

"What about one of those mouse droids?" Obi Wan inquired, stroking his beard. "Won't they have a directional map of the whole place hard-wired into their kinetic systems?"

Anakin feigned amazement. "Impressive, master. I didn't know you were so well informed about droid programming templates."

"I do have the best teacher," Obi Wan smiled back. "What about it?"

"Might work. You nab one and I'll take it apart."

Together they slipped from shadow to shadow, making for the interior entrance. Turning the corner swiftly, and pausing just inside the doors' framework, Anakin set to carving a small opening in the low ceiling of the passageway beyond while Obi Wan waited for the next mouse droid to scuttle into view around the bend in the hall. His unfortunate victim appeared promptly, zipping within a few meters of the intruders and then whirling round to beat a hasty retreat.

Too late – the Jedi lifted it off the floor with the Force and drew it into his own grasp. Then both droid-nappers leapt up into the narrow opening above.

Crouched on a support beam within the infrastructure, surrounded by venting ducts and the blinking circuit panels of a hundred different sensor and atmospheric systems, the Jedi studied their captive. The mouse droid's traction system still spun wildly, as though the thing were attempting to escape, but placed upside down on its back it had no hope of making progress.

"Like a sand turtle," Anakin remarked, fishing a microdriver and a few miniscule cybertools out of a pouch on his belt. He pried open the droid's carapace and set to work, tweaking and prodding at the simple mechanical creature's brains with his eyebrows drawn together and his mouth twisted to one side.

"Got it," he murmured, snatching a miniature holoprojector from another pocket and wiring it into the droid's processors. "There." He gave a twist to something deep inside the droid, and a shimmering map of the refueling station appeared above the projector plate, different levels and views replacing each other in rapid succession. The two Jedi studied it intently, watching the entire succession of images play before their eyes two or three times.

"Wait. Stop there." Obi Wan broke the silence. Anakin tweaked the droid's innards again, and the holomap hung suspended and unmoving before them.

"There's a generator core for the fuel processing system," Obi Wan pointed out.

Anakin gazed at the huge energy core which powered the conversion of gaseous raw tibanna into pressurized fuel. The long cylindrical core was supported by massive struts in a sub-zero temperature chamber. "We can't get in there," he objected. "And we don't have any explosives, anyway."

The older Jedi snorted softly. "After Devaron, I don't ever want to be in the same room with you and explosives again, thank you."

"That wasn't my fault!" Anakin protested. "And we got out before the whole ship blew apart."

"Hm," Obi Wan replied. "I was thinking it would be easier to sabotage the cooling system for the core. The main unit will overheat, melt down, back up the pressure regulator, and…" He waved a hand expressively through the air, eyes glittering.

This time Anakin really was amazed. "That sounds like something I would come up with. Getting inside the thermo-stabilizer is dangerous . And if the reaction is fast, the back up system might seal off the corridors to contain the blast. We could be cut off. That's assuming we can damage the coolant valves without killing ourselves. The whole thing's crazy," he added in a tone of warm approval.

"On that, you'll get no argument from me. Let's go have a look at the thermo-stabilizer shaft, shall we?"

They left the mouse droid on its back, uselessly spinning its traction gears, and disappeared down the narrow crawl-way.