AN: Hey there ladies and germs. A happy New Year to you all, here's a present for the winter holiday of your preference. In this chapter we take yet another step on the road to answers, and bring aboard our party's last core member. Hope you enjoy it!
Chapter 8: Part of the Circle
They fell from hyperspace, crossing the line between real and elsewhere, and immediately the music began pumping through the communication systems; thumping rhythms and sharp distorted strings with layered harmonies. Shana winced just a touch, and Wren rolled his eyes. Sure enough, it was coming through on almost every frequency.
"That's Fink," he said with a laugh. "A light year a minute, every minute."
The nebula stretched out before them, spanning light years in every direction. Deep within, swaddled in great billowing clouds of gaseous chemistry, newborn stars burned bright and pure, girdled with clouds of pre-planetary matter, gathering slower than any could perceive. As Wren guided the Lady in, a durasteel dart parting the gas and dust, what began as a rough speck shrouded in the nebula began to grow, until it loomed before them, filling the canopy windows.
They passed through a perimeter of massive defense stations first. They were around 200 meters wide and 500 long, with the look of flanged mace heads. Each bristled with weapons, thick grids of missile tubes along the flanges and clusters of oversized cannons between them; they rotated menacingly as the Lady passed, though Shana privately wondered how much of a threat they posed to a ship of the Lady's pedigree. Shana may not have known much about starships, their operation and their upkeep, but she had an appreciation for their capabilities as a riflewoman and jet trooper. The Hasty Lady was the sort of ship jetpack infantry dreamed of riding into a combat zone. A great big dreadnought might have packed more destructive capability, but true atmospheric flight lent a personal touch that couldn't be replicated from orbit.
Shana considered Wren for a moment. Out in the open, under a planetary atmosphere, he had the demeanor and bearing of something fierce and cornered. But within these bulkheads he was different; tucked away frow the world in his burrow, Wren was not the guarded fortress of unassailable tension he presented in public. She realized then that while she viewed the vessel as a sword of destruction, Wren's view of it was less lofty. This ship was his security blanket. It was no wonder he has been so adamant on this layover. She hadn't realized how much he felt the empty space in the Lady's magazines.
Within the defense perimeter was Fink's Starship Repair. Thirteen great egg shaped structures drifted in a loose cluster, each of the old Imperial torpedo spheres painted garishly with cartoonish beasts, historical persons, and starships. From twelve of them extended long latices of scaffolding. Ships coming and going parked in an asigned lane, and scaffolds deployed from the sphere to surround the vessel and deploy manipulator arms to render repairs and maintainance. A motley of vessels were connected to the webs of repair scaffolding.
There was a sizable Hutt fleet, lumpen, ugly vessels painted in septic shades of orange and brown; long lines of Kossak-class frigates lay docked alongside four Ajuur-class heavy cruisers and one massive and ancient Azalus-class dreadnought. There were also several mercenary groups of various sizes and compositions. One was in the process of docking, a school of Clone War surplus Arquentis and Consular-class cruisers clustered around a pair of Inexpungable-class command ships that dated back Mandalorian wars, spaceframes with 4,000 years in service. Another sizable force was composed of mostly ubiquitous craft, Corellian gunships, Marauder-class corvettes, Carrack-class light cruisers, but it was centered around a SoroSuub Bulwark-class battlecruiser that dwarfed the repair sphere servicing it. There was even a small New Republic battlegroup docked in an isolated section of the facility, where pairs of starfighters could patrol around to keep the riff-raff clear of the MC90 and its entourage of assault frigates, Corellian corvettes, and MC40a cruisers. In a similarly isolated corner of the facility was a Hapan Battle Dragon, guarded tightly by fighter screens with it's fivesome of Nova-class 'battlecruisers' alongside it, fearsome vessels despite not qualifying as battlecruisers in any commonly held classification system.
Throughout were the flotsam of the space ways; a haggard tapestry of common and exotic spacecraft, from bulk freighters mundane to the point of anonymity, to rare jewels of engineering like a Delta-7 Aethersprite, a J-type Nabooan starskiff, and several luxury yachts of assorted make and model.
The comm system garbled and distorted as SENA paired it to the traffic control signal, and Wren steered the Lady along her track, projecting a path onto the HUD that would lead them to their assigned docking fixture through the storm of activity. They pulled in alongside the center-most sphere, adorned with huge murals of gamehalls, resturaunts, and a grinning cartoon child with a drumstick of cooked avian in one hand and a hydrospanner in the other. Wren guided the Lady in through a an atmosphere containment field. Toiling within were four Verpine technicians, directing the small horde of repair droids as they accepted the arriving craft. As the Hasty Lady deployed landing struts and dropped ramp, the corridor door slid open, in walking a slight, gangly youth, barely taller than compact Shana. He wore his violently blond hair back behind his head, a red patterned bandana tied over it, his bangs framing his face. His eyes were a vivid purple Shana had never seen on a human before, and he wore a heavy mechanic's jumpsuit, opened halfway and tied about his waist at the moment, with boots, gloves, and a white undershirt. The boy cast a wave from the wall, and Wren returned it through the transparisteel with an easy, relaxed grin.
Seeing that sort of expression on his face, without an edge of rage, fear, or bloodlust, did strange, frustrating things to Shana's brain and gut. This was becoming more than just an extension of her weakness for wounded warriors, already a known and familiar quantiry. This trip had been a jaunt through a strange man's life, and Shana could only see that she'd yet to ply the depths. Wren was the ultimate puzzle. He was all duality; fierce pride and deep shame, unconditional altruism and pragmatic opportunism, a burning lust for life and an exhausting, anxious depression, a brash, strident confidence and skittish, bashful shyness.
The young human met them at the bottom of the crew ramp; Wren went in for a hug but recieved a kick in the shin instead. "What, I get you to Class .75 and you stop in half as often? Bantha fodder! I should space you for it." Wren dodged another shin kick, but the look on his face was hardly combative. "And I'll bet you've been mistreating my ship left and right. Force, look at that hull. Carbon scouring, microimpactive pitting, gotta be every sort of nebulaic chemical reaction going on there. A year and a half's worth of it, you utter savage."
"Nice to see you too," Wren sarcased with a sheepish grin. "I'm great Fink, never been better. Thanks for asking!"
Little Fink roared with laughter, moving past Wren to Hakyo, thumping the giant in the tummy once. "I'm sure that's all this one, isn't it? Been taking care of our buddy? Making sure he doesn't embalm himself?"
Hakyo emitted a low chortle. "I'm sure you don't forget, it is always Wren who takes care of us in the end." Eschlan blushed deeply, casting his eyes about in sullen embarrassment, and Shana observed that mannerism with that all too familiar flutter in her throat. She beamed, and Wren sank further into his growing humiliation.
"Wren'ika here has been doing an awful lot of that as of late," Shana teased. "You could almost call it heroic."
"I swear, if this goes on I'll just leave you all here," Wren grumbled, though his face spoke of jest under the embarrassment.
Fink laughed again, before sliding on through the group and into Shana's visor. "Shiny," he commented, rapping a loose fist against one shoulder plate. Shana's discomfort was overturned by curiosity when she observed Fink's eyes as they studied the metal intently. The vivid violet hue was outputting enough, but within those wide pools of color Shana viewed concentric rings, shifting and interlocking within the iris. "Top grade beskar, premium coatings, very nice." Fink gave her a once over, and whistled. "You can't help but make nice with dangerous people, Eschlan."
"Nice to meet you too," the Mando said with a shrug. "I'm Shana."
"Normally I would love to take a closer look at top of the line Mandalorian kit, but my masterpiece is right here. Only girl I'll ever need." Fink strode past them, setting a foot upon the lowered ramp. His voice took a very odd tone, distant from the abrasive but genial manner he had greeted them with. "You guys head on into the habitation levels; honestly, besides Hakyo you both look like you could drop from starvation any second. I'm gonna get set up here."
As Fink disappeared into the guts of the Hasty Lady, the captain, his crew and his charge proceeded deeper into the modified torpedo sphere. "You weren't kidding," Shana said with a puzzled look. "Evaar haamyc. Strange kid. Did you see how he looked at the ship? Thought he might break down and cry."
Wren chuckled quietly, shaking his head. "There's a bunch of things going on there," Wren eventually muttered, trying to keep a tight reign on personal subjects. "The Lady is Fink's baby first and foremost. There's stuff in there that's proprietary, stuff he's put a huge amount of research and experimentation into, stuff only he really understands. The kid is an artist whose medium happens to be starships. The Hasty Lady is one of his masterpieces, so he gets really protective of it."
Shana nodded, considering their frosty interaction in a new light. She wasn't just the new face playing sidekick to old friends; they were all intruders in the studio of a virtuoso. "And?"
Wren made a showy gesture, tapping his temple with the tips of his fingers. "Remember how I said he's raised by Verpines? Well, those implants he got for RF communication with the rest of the hive, the human brain was never designed to process those kinds of signals. And the implants themselves are much higher test than the Verpine organs they emulate. The result is that Fink gets huge amounts of junk signals that he has to filter through, at all times. When he eats, bathes, sleeps, all of it. He was catatonic for almost a year after the implantation, until he learned how to filter the data right."
"Hm." Cybernetic enhancement was well beyond Shana's expertise, but none of that sounded pleasant.
"It's not just the Lady," Wren continued, his face taking a witsful, knowing expression. "It's SENA too. She can do the kind of signal processing needed to produce an active jamming effect across Fink's entire receiving spectrum; a countersignal that blocks out the noise, like a good headset. She's had his heart stowed away in her storeage medium ever since they figured it out."
"Aww, so they're a couple then?"
"Nah," Wren said with a shake of his head. "SENA... Isn't set for relationships."
Shana turned to meet Wren's gaze, walking sideways down the corridor. Her grin was conspiracy and mirth. "But she does fancy him back. No?"
Wren stumbled over his words, eventually gesturing to Hakyo, who loosed a long string of grunts and barks. "SENA regards Fink very highly," his translator intoned. "And likely trusts him far more than she trusts Wren, to say nothing of you or I. But she is without form, and cannot approach the concept of romance as she is. SENA is highly sensitive of this topic, and it is not to be discussed in her presence."
Shana nodded, prying no further. "Do we really look that bad?" She wondered. "I mean, I'm starving. I can only assume you are too. But it was just a day, maybe. I've gone longer on less on the kyrbej." They passed through two pairs of double doors, and into a huge chamber, packed on one end with resturaunt seating and filled with gaming tables on the other end.
"Yeah, Mon Gazza has a way of doing that," he hollered over the din. "You wouldn't believe the growl I had going when I finally left."
A human wearing a casual uniform came up to the group and lead them to a booth table, and before long a parade of foodstuffs was arrayed before them, a bloody carcass for Hakyo and sizable, artfully arranged bowls of seafood layered over seasoned grain for Wren and Shana, and a roiling pot of stew between the three of them, loaded to brimming with meats, seafood, veg and noodles.
Their chatter and laughter rang out through the bustling amusement hall.
Fink sat crosslegged on the floor of the repair bay, alternating his vision between his datapad and the vessel before him. Reaching for his wristpad, he increased the output of the bay's degaussing modules. Rolling to his feet, he strode over to the ventral starboard composite beam, scooping a small case up off a rolling cart. Slipping his hand inside the case, he removed it, now wearing the sterile glove contained within. He used the glove to change a set of five focusing lenses, before returning the glove to its sterilizing case and closing the tributary ray assembly.
"Rearmor that, please," he delegated to a D99-X repair droid, directing it to replace the turret's armored cover. He did it verbally; the chamber was devoid of Verpine, it was just Fink and a few droids. The D99-X placed and secured the two halves of the armored cover, one on each side of the emitter and its traversal. Once secured, Fink pressed a key on his wristpad; the armored cover snapped shut and the turret recessed into the hull. "I'm going inside to flush out the tibana supply so we can refill the gas cells."
Fink marched up the ramp, winding his way through the halls of the YZ-775, into the rear engineering compartment. Hefting a canister of orange gas, he fixed it to the tibana storeage system, and began configuring a system flush.
"You did the composite beams in record time," SENA said from the wall. Fink hummed to himself.
"We've been getting a lot of them lately. Seems like they're back in style," he said, thumbing the additive control. The solvent gas cycled through the ship's tibana cells and the tubing that directed that tibana to the Hasty Lady's assorted energy weapons, scouring away residual sediment.
"We were into it before it was cool, then," SENA quipped. "How hipster."
Fink rolled his eyes, waiting and monitoring the tibana system console as the cleaning gas recollected in the canister that delivered it, now a darker shade for the tibana crud it collected from the Lady's innards. "Now then. R8-E3, take this to disposal, please," Fink said, handing the canister off to the white and bronze astromech. "Time for the main course."
Fink strode to the rear of the engineering section, fixing his fingers about the main console. With just a moment's hesitation, he ordered open the primary reactor chamber. A bulge sitting between the YZ's upper two drives, one a purist would note as an end user addition, gave way, layered armored hatches peeling back to reveal a path to the space within. The original reactor chamber had been converted into equipment to support The Hasty Lady's heart, Fink's true masterstroke. Though an impressive array, the Lady's arsenal was composed of conventional technogies. But stowed in the added compartment between the main engines was something unique and unparalleled. It was a hypermatter reactor, the smallest and most efficient of its kind, with a volume-to-output ratio rivaling that of the Death Stars. And only Fink knew how to service it.
The human augment strode back down the ramp, editing his dataslate, before stowing it on his belt and clambering up the side of the ship, back to the now exposed reactor core. He breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing his most treasured creation, dirty and worn but unharmed and fully operational. And with a little love, it would house a matter-energy reaction that would shame the death of any star with its intensity. Hypermatter physics was one of Fink's specialties, and the full extent of his mastery over it was a power Fink used with the utmost caution.
"How does it look, doctor?" SENA asked, a soft voice separating a soothing low hum; not silence, but nearer to it than the never ending buzz. Near enough to it to soothe the ache in his head he spent all his days ignoring.
"Oh, not so bad," he cast back, switching visual filters and magnification settings. His wide violet eyes peered into the molecular structure of the reactor materials, ferreting out deposits of chemical buildup and testing the integrity of the various components. "A couple new fuel injectors, new containment field relays, new pulse regulator, a clean reactor chamber and she'll be the brightest star in the sky again. A better question might be how does it feel?"
"In here?" Within the Lady, in the droid bay, SENA pulsed and flared in her crystalline home, a matrix of energy contained within the endless facets of her rough cylinder of processed Corusca gem capped at each end with a durasteel-clad connective port, each line and seam within the material lighting up and then dimming like firing neurons. "In here it's all fine. Not a single bit of storage loss, no chemical change in the substrate. It's what happens outside the Corusca that worries me these days."
Fink nodded once, descending through the opening and into the reactor chamber. He set about removing worn components for replacement. "The new girl. What's her deal?"
"She's pedestrian as far as I can tell. Bounty hunter, mercenary; a good one, but nothing sinister that I can find on the holonet. It's what she does to Wren that I can't jive with. You saw about Mon Gazza?"
"Oh fek, that was you guys?!" Fink swore under his breath, with his real voice.
"She convinced him to do it. Not that it wasn't on his to do list anyways, but timing, you know? We're supposed to be protecting this girl, she's making it more difficult than it needs to be, and he's helping her do it. I've never seen him so senseless. Not since the last one," SENA continued.
Fink nodded, recalling Wren as he was upon purchasing the ship that would become the Hasty Lady. "The one that convinced him to get off that rustball in the first place. The one that carried him off to paradise, patched his spirit back together, and then vanished into the night."
"The very same. You can see the precedent for my concern, right? Wren is a natural warrior, in the cockpit and out of it, but his weakspot is that beat up heart of his. And this one has him in a bad way, for real."
Fink chose his words carefully as he disconnected the spent pulse regulator, tossing it over his shoulder and out of the reactor chamber. The part colided with a WED-15 repair droid, which bleated and hooted in protest; thankfully it struck the somewhat durable tread cover of the spindly multiarmed machine, rather than the fragile and expensive photoreceptors. "Sorry!" He shouted, wincing hard as he returned to electronic communication. "What was I about to say? Right. The Nabooan got Wren to the point where he could actually engage with you. Yeah, she disappeared without a trace, but in the end she left him in a better state than she found him."
"That doesn't come even with what it did to him when she split. Or the things he got into because of it." There was no venom or heat in SENA's tone, it was just a statement of well-discussed fact.
"No, it doesn't. But the point is that Wren finds his own way. We all follow him, to some degree. Some less, some more, with change over time, but when he calls, we answer,; no matter the time or distance, because we all trust that vision that guides him along." Fink locked the last new component in place, heading into his final visual inspection of the reactor. "If Wren thinks this Shana has a place as a part of the circle, it's likely for good reason."
"Yeah. I know. I just can't help but worry. Things were finally getting back to stable."
The chatter of voices broke the silence of the nearly vacant bay as the door slid open, allowing Wren, Shana, and Hakyo to spill inside. Fink climbed his way out of the hypermatter reactor, closing it with a few keys on his wristpad, before vaulting down to the floor.
"Maintainence and repair are just about done," the young engineer reported. "I wanna talk to you about some additions I've cooked up. I've got an overhauled sensor array that just needs to be installed so we can work out an interference-free setup. Then there's the aft-mounted triple-drum launcher and armor package we talked about last you were here, those are all ready to go, just plug and play."
Wren whistled, impressed, but before anyone could comment further, a blaring alarm sounded. "SENA, I need a clear signal," Fink casted, and immediately the voices of his Verpine colleagues leapt into his mind. "There's been an unauthorized access. Three levels up on the other side of the sphere, rolling deep and armed up to to the antennae. I'm still trying to figure out how they got past the defense grid, I've got a couple of hunches. But I can't get in contact with the bridge, and that's a whole new level of worrying."
Fink pressed a button on his wristpad, projecting a hologram of a camera feed. Long, six-legged insectoids came around the corner at the end of the corridor, exchanging fire with a team of Verpine security officers. Similar scenes played out across a series of other camera feeds, and from looks were worn all around, but none grimmer than Shana's. "Bartokk," she spat like a curse, her right hand straying towards her beskad. "Hive-minded assassin species, vicious, ruthless, and they're wearing full armor suits, from the look of it. Osi'kyr!"
"I'm pretty sure I've got it," Fink said. "Only way they got this deep into the complex undetected is with a cloaking device, stygium or hybridium based. That explains why we can't figure the bay they entered from. Their transport is out there, cloaked, waiting till they gain control of the station. If they haven't already."
"They're not here for the station," Wren commented. He jerked his head in Shana's direction. "They're here for her, courtesy of some very pissed off 3rd parties. We've been dodging their mercenary hires since Naruku III."
Fink nodded in affirmation. "Well either way, we've got two problems. Containing the boarding parties here on the repair levels, and making contact with the bridge to set up some of our more exotic sensor systems so we can find their ship."
"I'm engaging the intruders," Shana blurted, green eyes narrow with rage. "I've waited long enough to meet these creatures again. I've business to settle with these hut'uune." She jogged up the ramp, set on a few extra things from her bag on the Lady.
Hakyo drew his N'gant-Zarvel, beating his chest. "I will assist you," the brute insisted, turning to Fink. "But if this is as pitched a battle as it seems it will be, I will require another weapon. Something big, preferably."
The shipwright flashed a cheeky grin. "I've got something I know you'll like," he responded, jogging off out the door with Hakyo in tow.
"You'll need my help to get the sensors set up timely," SENA said through Wren's headset, prompting him to board the Lady as well
The alarm rang on as the five scrambled to prepare for battle.