Chapter 39

The Orbit of Shili

The ship wasn't responding. Caloc fiddled with every button, control lever, and position of the stick, constantly aware of the gravity pulling him towards the ground. He toggled the acceleration lever back and forth, but got nothing. The ship simply refused to level out. No thrust, no flight. Space whirled around him, and he was getting dizzy just watching the stars whip past. The huge mass of a planet in front of him, the one that had been filling his cockpit for the last while, suddenly fell away as he was pulled from its gravitational pull, into another. Somehow, the new direction levelled him out, and he shot a glance over to the Triumph. The ship was still in one piece, and still…

A barrage of cannon fire ripped into the side of the centre of the ship, and it skittered sideways a few metres. A few huge chunks of debris drifted free, and he watched as the metal began to burn. Each of the debris chunks would create craters as they slammed into the surface. With any luck Mark would be able to avoid a crash landing and bring the ship in carefully. He tried to watch it fall – to see where it landed – but he was suddenly interrupted by sparks across his own control panel.

"Deesix, track the Triumph. See where it lands. I want at least a rough area where I will have to search later."

The droid bleeped in acknowledgement. The cockpit's view was now dominated by the mass of one of the moons. Hopefully, this was an oxygenated moon. He really didn't know much about Shili or its moons. They had one last chance to put some power into the engines. The bio-electricity that surged through his arm could give the starfighter a tiny bit of a boost, bit it would also completely destroy the drive systems. One final massive jolt of power.

Tapping at the controls on his arm's 'heart', he rerouted the energy and prepared to deliver a charge directly into the systems. Prying the panel from the main controls, he slammed his left arm straight into the wires and grabbed hold. Releasing a long, slow breath, he let go of the control he had been feeling since the limb had been unwrapped from its cast in the medical centre for the first time. Electricity burst from the arm and arced around the small cockpit. The bio-electric rays rebounded about the glass. One hit him square in the head, and he blacked out.

When Caloc came to, his world had changed dramatically. For starters, he wasn't dead. He should have been, no matter his ability with the Force. But here he was, both alive and in a smoke-filled cockpit that was quickly running out of breathable air. Grabbing the lightsabre from the small rivet he had lain it in before take-off, he ignited the sapphire blade. It slashed through the transparisteel cockpit bubble, and he pushed the two halves aside and dove from the smoke. The thought occurred to him too late; was he in an oxygenated atmosphere? Cautiously, he took a long breath in, and thankfully, his lungs were filled with precious, clean oxygen. He gratefully released the breath and looked around at his surroundings.

It was night. The sky above was black, full of the multi-coloured pinpricks of stars. He could see Tinmore III, a dot brighter than the rest of the stars in the system. Looking down, he saw the flaming spot fires that surrounded him. Flaming bits of metal. Upturned dirt. Beyond that, he couldn't see anything. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened. Tiny critters scrabbled back and forth, their scurrying carried though the still night air. Nearby, a beast howled at the moon. Everything seemed normal, or as normal as a deserted, dark night could.

Hboo… Hbooo… Hboo…

That noise was out of place. Was it danger? He tensed, stretching out with the Force to try and sense anything. No, no one was nearby. Besides, the repetitive noise was nearby, and as he listened, he realised that it was familiar. He looked around, trying to figure out where it was coming from. His starfighter was half buried in a mound of sandy dirt. The nose was bent and broken, but closer to the cockpit would be… Deesix! Where was his droid? He looked around at each rock, his eyes scanning around. There! He could just see the dome of his friend, partially visible through the smoke for a split second. Hurrying forward, he knelt by the droid, who was also, like the starfighter, half-buried in the dirt. He must have ejected at the last moment.

"Deesix.", he whispered through the shock still pounding through his skull.

Again, the hboo… hboo… hboo echoed from beneath the dirt. He began clawing at the mound, but the molecules were already hard, packed tight against each other.

Use the Force.

He spun, look around the smoke-filled area. There was no one there. It was the voice again. The same one that had saved his life of Devaron. He slowed his breathing, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself looking at the mound of dirt differently. This mound was covered in faint red lines. Each darted across the surface like a crack, and he traced them along each other until he found what he was looking for. Three spots where they intersected. Fingers curled into a fist, and in rapid succession, he hit each point and pushed the Force through the dirt. The dirt cracked, breaking apart. Deesix's dome appeared as he pushed the dirt aside. Still moving with an urgency that he wasn't sure was necessary, he grabbed the astromech and pulled at his struts, trying to pry him from the ground. The droid was like a stubborn cork. Eventually though, he popped out. It seemed to be just in time too. As Caloc and R4-D6 leapt from the Delta-7B's hull, the engines exploded. Both droid and Jedi were picked up by the surrounding shockwave, and slammed into the rock walls beside them. Caloc rolled over, staring up into the sky as the stars slowly went dark.

When consciousness found him a second time, he could only hear a dull ringing through his brain. He scrabbled about for his lightsabre, though why was beyond the fuzz clouding in his brain. He grabbed it and ignited it, as though that would somehow clear the air. Except, that it didn't ignite. The regal sapphire blade spluttered and died in his hand.

He stared at the hilt as though it had personally offended him. The hilt was blackened and covered in soot. A shard of roughly triangular metal jutted out from the leather grip. Grabbing the shard, he ripped it out, then pulled the new hole in the weapon up to peer into it. Several wires had been sliced through, and the focussing crystals were shattered. Effectively making the weapon useless. He let it drop to the ground.

His Master's lessons breached his head again. "Watch your surroundings. Be mindful of where the Force places you. It has a reason for every ripple it will put in your life."

He looked around, his eyes blinking with uncertainty. Blacking out twice in a few hours was not great for the body. It was light now. Well, a dark grey instead of the black of night. If he had to guess, it was early morning. The surroundings were the same they had been the first time, but he could see a bit further. He had been unconscious twice in enemy territory. He might as well have been served on a platter for any predator to find.

The first thing he saw was the twelve-metre trench of freshly turned dirt trailing up to the now-smoking crater that was his starfighter. Scraps of the dark green hull and pieces of the internal mechanisms littered the freshly turned ground. No, wait. That was not dirt and grass. That was sand. Why was it sand? The ground rose from where he lay, becoming dirt, a pile of boulders, and finally a large plastacrete wall that stretched for about five hundred metres above him. Red lights blinked from towers up the top of the wall. About three hundred metres above, five tubes protruded from the wall. The sound of water lapping against the plastacrete made him swallow nervously.

It was a dam. A dam wall. He was in the middle of the causeway. Depending how much water this dam was holding back, any damage he had caused by first crashing and then exploding his fighter… if it had been compromised, the sensor arrays up the top would open the pinstock tubes before him to release the additional pressure. He didn't want to think about what would happen then.

On either side of the dam were high cliffs were grey stone blocks carved into the cliffs that formed the sides. Stairs! Huge stairs for sure, but still man-made stairs. Looking around, he grabbed what little of his possessions had survived the crash. It wasn't much. With his fighter gone, so were his foodstuffs. All he had was the liquid and food capsules stored on his belt. He did find a charred scrap of metal that must have been part of his fighter's wing. The circled Ruping that had made his ship unique to the other Jedi starfighter's was still visible. He grabbed some torn up wires and strapped it across his back.

A loud rumble split the sky, and he strained to see the cause. Thankfully, the sound seemed to be coming from the sky, not the dam. The edge of the horizon was thick with heavy, grey clouds. A curtain of thick rain blockaded the distance. Within hours, the dam's floodgate would be completely flooded. He and Deesix needed to get out of here.

He looked over at Deesix, "Are you okay, buddy?"

The droid clicked and whirred as he did a system diagnostic, but reported nothing that seemed out of place.

"Good to hear.", he looked up at the crash-site smoke, twirling lazily into the air. "I don't know if there are hostiles here. If there are, that smoke will show them exactly where we are. We need to move."

Deesix concurred with that assessment, adding his own comment about the nearing rain. He rolled forward, beeping loudly. Caloc spun slowly, trying to pick a direction. Actually, he was trying to figure out which way north was. His Master always said to head north when in crisis. Or was that east? Or west? He knew it wasn't south.

The stubby astromech was within five feet of the padawan when something hit his right strut. He bent to look down at the lightsabre hilt lying in the dirt nearby. His friend's hilt. It was clearly broken, with a huge scar running up the side. But Deesix himself had been broken in the past too. Anything could be fixed, eventually. This weapon was clearly special to his friend. So, he bent down and grabbed the hilt with one of his tools, tucking it away inside his ports.

"Shall we go that way?", Caloc pointed up one of the rock walls, apparently giving up on north and just picking randomly. "I think that if we can get some height, we might know more about this place. I might even be able to remember which way is north."

Again, Deesix concurred. He tried to click his aerial jet boosters in place. The left one slid easily into position. The right booster stopped halfway, jammed against a piece of internal metal that had been knocked loose. He bleeped a quiet curse, then relayed the information to Caloc. The padawan chuckled, reaching down. Tearing away a three-metre strip of fabric from the bottom of his undertunic, he began to knot them together.

"Well then, looks like I'm carrying you."