Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

[Inyos Aamoran]

The bright blue and swirling tempest of hyperspace shattered into pinpricks as the ARC-170 - not old enough to be an antique, but most definately a classic - lurched back into the realm where the normal laws of physics applied.

Instantly, the fuselage began to rumble and shudder disconcertingly, as the battered intertial compensators struggled to counteract the slight fluxuations and misfires in the axial RCS thrusters. Seated in the forward-most compartment of the fighter's dual-tiered cockpit, Inyos ignored the conflicting information that the derelict navigational sensors squalked at him, and instead aimed the 170's raptor-like beak towards the most easily recognisable ship in the Wheel: the Challenger.

"Hang on back there," Inyos called over his shoulder in his usual flat and verbose tone, tightening his vice-grip around the fighter's controls.

He spared a glance at the nav screen, peering with narrowed eyes between the bursts of static that addled the display. Though the sensors were too far gone to identify any of the few dozen ships that drifted in space before him by name, he was able to make out telltale movements as the combat air patrol peeled away from their expected course, diverting to intercept the mystery ship that had appeared amongst them.

He eased back on the main engines, and tapped the forward thrusters enough to visibly decrease the fighter's speed: not enough to bring them to a stop, but an easily visible way to make the craft appear less hostile towards the approaching Rebels; just in case yet another system aboard the battered ship decided to fail at exactly the wrong moment.

More words were thrown over his shoulder to the Jedi seated behind him. "If the repairs to the communications array have not shaken loose, now would be an excellent time to make use of it."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Her eyes were screwed shut, and white-knuckled fists had been thrown out to either side of the small cockpit to steady herself amidst the stomach-rattling that the ship gave her. The whole thing sounded as if it wanted to simply fly apart at any moment. Unused systems sputtered to life, then blinked out for minutes at a time; sometimes a good jab brought them back, other times they came back on their own. It was one of the worst decisions she'd ever made, climbing into the cockpit of this... thing... with Inyos. She'd even tried to argue to stay, but the man had been persuasive enough, and their time was in short supply, and steadily growing shorter.

"Nothing works in this old monster," came the response, growled out through clenched teeth.

But, s'Il pulled one hand away from the inner bulkhead to punch at the comm panel's transmit switch.

"Challenger this is Loklorien s'Ilancy - "

She paused, feeling the first awful stages of what she knew was inevitable. Fighting back the bile in the back of her throat, the Lupine abandoned decorum and cut to the heart of the matter. The man listening on the other side knew her well enough from past experiences what was likely to come if it already hadn't.

"Vansen... " a few deep breaths.

"Vansen we're going to need to make a hard berth."

She swallowed.

"And get me my medicine."

[Vansen Tyree]

"Report!"

Vansen's barked command echoed from the elevator the second the doors parted, confident strides carrying the Commodore into the CIC in hot pursuit.

It was an odd quirk of the Venator-class design. Because of the sheer number of fighters the old Jedi Cruisers were able to deploy, the craft featured two identical command towers, side by side: the port tower housing the Combat Information Center, responsible for the command and control of the air wing; the starboard tower countaining the ship's Bridge.

While the Challenger didn't carry her war-time compliment of thirty-five squadrons, her role as command ship for the Wheel presented an entirely new set of challenges. The starboard tower and CIC had been dedicated to working with the civilian fighters and transports that the fugitive Jedi fleet had collected: coordinating cargo transfers, refuelling operations, and the arduous task of jumping several dozen ships crewed by untrained civilians through hyperspace, usually while under fire.

Vansen didn't envy the responsibilities of any the Alliance operators stationed in the CIC; and he knew their job was difficult enough without having his imposing presence looming over them, instead leaving that job to the slightly friendlier Colonel Pressly.

Instead, Vansen generally confined himself to the Bridge. Today however was an exception: Pressly was aboard the Valiant coordinating a training exercise, and the Officer of the Deck had summoned him personally.

In response to the Commodore's command, the Lieutenant handed a comlink headset to Tyree. "An unidentified vessel just dropped out of hyperspace; Master s'Ilancy is aboard, but her message seems to be for you directly."

He hesitated for a moment, allowing Vansen to settle the headset in place. "I took the liberty of recording the message for playback."

A few commands on the console repeated the recieved message into Vansen's ear; though the words were twisted by static and what sounded like a faulty transmitter, the message was undeniably clear.

His eyes snapped to the Lieutenant. "Contact the bridge: have them clear the area around the port landing doors, and have a crash crew standing by. Then tell the CAP to relay an approach vector to s'Ilancy's ship: if their comm array is fried, I don't want to risk a garbled transmission; the CAP might have better luck sending a signal from closer range."

"And if they don't?"

Vansen's lips tugged into a grim line. "I want that bird home, Lieutenant. If all else fails, our pilots will have to nudge her until she's pointing in the right direction."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Static buzzed out of the cockpit speakers like a swarm of angry saber-wasps. Inyos strained, trying to make out a few discernable words either from the audio or data feeds that the Wheel had transmitted, but the console screens were as useless as the comm array.

He glanced out of the transparisteel dome, eyes settling on the cockpit of the Alliance fighter that was now flying in formation off to starboard. The pilot - one of the Thunderbolts, if Inyos had recognised the squadron colours correctly - tapped the side of his helmet; a simple unspoken query about the status of their communications. Inyos gestured back that their message was not recieved.

The pilot's attention shifted slightly; Inyos could see his lips moving, but wasn't well-enough versed in espionage to interpret what was being said. The exchange was short; the pilot soon signalled for Inyos to decrease speed, and to form up behind his A-Wing.

Despite his Jedi calm, Inyos couldn't help a brief flutter of dread that stirred in the back of his chest. He understood exactly what the pilot was proposing; and for a fleeting moment he considered keeping those details to himself, to avoid alarming Master s'Ilancy any further. Honesty was a virtue, however. He swallowed, hard.

"You're not going to like this," he admitted, easing the ARC-170 into formation. "The fighter in front of us is going to lead us along a safe path through the Wheel, right up to the hangar doors of the Challenger. They will veer off at the last possible second, and then -"

He trailed off. "Given the condition of our craft, it is likely that we will then have to use the hangar deck itself to arrest our forward momentum."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

She groaned in answer, and screwing her eyes shut, s'Il bowed her head while still bracing herself against the fighter's shuddering. If she ventured a look out the cockpit it would make this already bad trip so much worse, so she remained oblivious to the goings on of their escort.

Inyos banked slightly to compensate for the aged vessel's inconsistent sublights while still keeping in formation with the A-wings, and s'Il gave a small smack to the dome with her fist.

Why? Why had she agreed to this? She could have been left behind, her stomach and internal maladies spared the inglorious consequences of Inyos' insistent badgering that she return with him. She had told him time and again, yet he'd not given up until, in a fit, she'd thrown up her arms in defeat and made the terrible journey up into the cockpit. And when he'd fired up the engines? s'Il had very nearly gotten right back out. But, true to his words when they'd first met, the man was an exceptional enough pilot and had had the ARC-170 in the air before she could throw open the cockpit dome and crawl back out.

With her eyes still clamped shut, s'Il managed a few careful words.

"Inyos -"

He banked again, leveling out as they passed by one of the smaller freighters in the Wheel, and she grit her teeth momentarily before going on.

"... I'd like to rethink the decision to fly in this thing."

[Inyos Aamoran]

"Sure," Inyos muttered, only sparing a fraction of his attention, his eyes focussed instead on the distant dagger-like shape of the Challenger, and the knife-edge profile that was rapidly turning into a very large and imposing durasteel wall.

"Just be sure to close the door behind you. I prefer my lungs with air in."

Inyos watched as the A-Wing peeled away, leaving him headed straight towards the rectangular port landing doors with their sawn off corners. They were inside the Challenger's shield perimeter now: he had no instruments to inform him of that, but he'd landed a fighter aboard a Jedi Cruiser enough times during the Clone Wars to make a fairly reliable estimate.

He killed the engines, relying on momentum to take them from there. For a blessed moment, the turbulant vibration of the ARC-170 stopped, the engines no longer competing with each other to twist the craft in unwanted directions. Unfortunately, it didn't last; they rapidly passed through the magnetic barriers holding the Challenger's atmosphere in place, and the combination of air resistance and artificial gravity made the fighter shudder violently.

Inyos reached out, flipping the control that would activate the repulsorlifts. He flicked it again, and again; the bottom fell out of his stomach as the magnetic cushion that would lower them leaf-like to the ground stubbornly refused to activate.

There was no time to think; just time to act. Inyos dropped the nose, and fired the yaw thrusters hard. The fighter lurched violently, slamming into the deck plating and swinging wildly around. Sparks flew and friction screached as the 170 made it's agonising way aft-first across the hangar deck.

Inyos was tossed about in the cabin; the rapid shift in momentum had thrown him forward, and a hand slammed in reflex on the transparisteel canopy was the only thing that stopped his head from slamming into it instead. With an effort he forced himself back into his seat, tucked up his limbs, and hoped hard that there was a mechanic standing ready with a fire extinguisher.

[Vansen Tyree]

Vansen didn't run. He was far too old for energetics like that; not too mention to entrenched in his grizzled and stoic fascade. But as he sped across the hangar towards the shipwreck-in-progress, he couldn't remember moving so quickly in fourty years.

Some sort of condensate plumed as one of the ground crew let loose with a fire extinguisher on the ship's engines, rapidly robbing the old crate of heat and fire before something leaked or sparked, and blasted a crater in the side of his ship.

The rescue crew began to cluster around the ship, ready to surge into drill-practiced action; but before they managed to start swarming across the wreck, Vansen saw signs of movement through the scratch-dulled canopy. Shoving his way through the cluster of mechanics, he userped the Devaronian rolling a set of portable steps into position, and lept to the top.

As soon as there was a gap big enough to fit a set of fingers, he grabbed hold of the canopy and wrenched it forward, forcing it through it's now dented and twisted runners.

His eye flicked from one Jedi to the other. "You both still alive in here?"

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

There was a moment, when he'd cut the sublights, that the beastly spacecraft had settled itself into a smooth glide. s'Il would have breathed in relief if she didn't already know what was to come next. Passing through the barrier, she felt her stomach first drop, then twist into unforgiving knots. And as the underbelly met the decking in a violent shower of sparks and the sound of metal against metal, the Lupine knew that the end was near.

She hunched over, her arms still thrown out, and as they finally ground to a halt, she remained utterly motionless. The sounds of the deck crews outside, all moving in conjunction with one another to calm the settling 170, reached her ears over the ship's groaning. A long, shaking breath was let out through her nose as the muscles of her jaw clenched stubbornly. She was beyond words by now.

The grating of the canopy being shoved along its' runners filled her ears, but still she didn't open her eyes. Her hands however moved of their own accord, from their iron grip on the bulkhead to the cockpit lining. Vansen's gravelly timbre was a welcome sound, and she reached up blindly, feeling as he grasped her searching hand to help pull her to her feet.

She almost whimpered, half-standing on weak knees and swaying for only a moment before doubling over the back of Inyos' chair, past his shoulder, and emptying the contents of her stomach directly into his lap.

[Inyos Aamoran]

Even in his early days as a Padawan, Inyos had always posessed an incredible degree of self control. It was something that he had honed and perfected during the Purge, and during his years on Ord Ithil.

Despite that, the combination of the odor now flooding the semi-enclosed cockpit, and the unsettling sensation of moisture seeping through the inconveniently porous fabric of his clothing proved to be especially taxing.

Forcing his tone to remain even, he focused his attention directly on the Commodore's good eye. "Master s'Ilancy and I have discovered something; something of great strategic importance. However, we must act urgently, before it falls into Imperial hands."

He glanced down at his lap momentarily. "Though at this precise moment, I believe a change of clothing may be even more urgent."

[Vansen Tyree]

Vansen frowned, narrowing his eye into a penetrating cycloptic gaze as he scrutinised the two Jedi before him. The refugees in the Jedi fleet thought everything was urgent, but there were too many questions that needed answering for the Commodore to simply ignore. The two had left in one battered relic - the old T-2c shuttle that Aamoran owned - and had returned in another, even more decrepid beast. Loklorien was not a fan of flying, and yet she'd agreed to step into a ship that was barely able to fly. And the mention of Imperials...

He snapped around, attention falling on whichever member of the ground crew happened to be closest. "Get this man some clean pants!" he barked, his gaze lingering only long enough to confirm that the mechanic had scampered away.

He turned to s'Ilancy, but thought better of it, given the palid colour her skin still retained. Hoping for a slightly less cryptic and evasive response from Aamoran this time, his voice became hushed. "Mind telling me what the hell is going on here?"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Three Days Ago...

Inyos worked silently, rummaging with data cables beneath the console of the Emerald Knight. Unlike it's namesake, the clunky old shuttle wasn't even remotely adaptive; though the ship wasn't entirely to blame. Over the two or three decades since the Knight had been built, several computer hardware standards had advanced. The guidance processors now had a new socket set; the connectors for the data storage modules had been redesigned; and the new standard of memory modules currently on the market wouldn't fit into the old-style ports.

It wasn't the ship's fault; and yet Inyos still felt the need to blame something for the sheer inconvenience of the task at hand. He wasn't a mechanic, but the Knight was a personal craft, and was thus far lower down the list of priorities for the repair crews. Granted, the small team of Rebel technicians aboard the Whaledon didn't have to patch up battle-scarred starfighters, but the constant technical failings of the old transport kept them pretty busy.

The result was that Inyos was now buried beneath a kilometer of data cable, trying to translate the cryptic multicoloured strands into something comprehensible enough to replace the old ports with new ones, making them ready to accept the new gadgets and gizmos that the Alliance had been salvaging.

With a grunt of frustration - without anyone around to observe him, he'd let his usual uptight stoicism slip just a little - he tried his best to shove the most recently recalibrated conduit home; not easy, given the awkward angle at which his wrist was twisting. Several straining seconds later, and a brief retasking of a screwdriver as a crude hammer, the duraplast connector settled home, and a reassuring bleep sounded from the console above.

Wriggling free, Inyos clambered back to his feet, and scrutinised the information streaming across the screen in front of him. the nav computer seemed to be booting up happily - and, thank the maker, faster than it had before - which implied his latest round of repairs and upgrades had been a success. Of course, a flawless repair would have been too much to ask for.

The indicator light on the comm array was incessantly blinking.

Inyos stared at it disapprovingly for a few moments, but the light refused to be silenced by his stare. He sighed, and crouched down in front of the console, wrenching the access panel free... but as the neatly bundled cables that he exposed reminded him, nothing he'd been working on should have had any impact to the comm systems - they were entirely separate.

Frowning, he surfaced again, and punched in the commands for a full diagnostic on the shuttle's trancievers. Everything checked out fine. Which left only one conclusion: the shuttle had picked up a signal.

That in itself was not unusual. Communications were fired back and forth within the Wheel all the time, and the trancievers on civilian ships routinely screened them out. But Inyos had written a protocol into the shuttle that would only alert him of the presence of such signals when he activated it. Right now, the Knight should have been blissfully unaware of any Alliance radio chatter.

He punched in a few more instructions, and a stream of data appeared. Signal was the same kind of lightspeed transmission that inter-Wheel communications employed, but the encryption and the frequency were all wrong. It looked familiar, but he couldn't quite place it; not until he activated the automatic decrpytion software.

Within moments, the abstract transmission resolved into a handful of aurabesh characters and digits. Most of it appeared to be a set of data coordinates, with a generic call of distress attached. But that wasn't the most significant part.

The code was Jedi.

Leaping to his feet, Inyos had thundered half-way down the boarding ramp before he stopped to think. His impulse was to rush out and tell someone; but who? It could have been nothing - a stray, decades-old transmission left over from the Clone Wars. A primordial desire to avoid embarassment made him reluctant to approach the Council, just in case it proved to be nothing.

Moving more calmly this time, he returned to the cockpit, and settled himself down in the co-pilot's seat. "Priority message for Loklorien s'Ilancy," he announced into the microphone, after inputting the commands to record and transmit a message to the Challenger. "Master s'Ilancy: this is Inyos Aamoran aboard the Whaledon. I have stumbled upon something of great importance, and require your immediate advice."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Aboard the Challenger



Like every morning when she was with the Wheel, Lok s'Ilancy sat in the office of Commodore Vansen Tyree. The two had made it a point to spend the first part of their days in this exact manner, going over the daily tasks and duties that would need to be performed. None were allowed within the confines of the Commodore's office during these times, including even Colonel Pressly.

What actually happened behind that closed door was a closely guarded secret, and one that many rumors had grown from.

Sitting in front of Vansen's desk, s'Il was leaned back in her seat looking for all the galaxy like a content mother hen. On the desk's surface were two stacks of flimsiplasts - one in front of her and one in front of the Commodore who sat just as comfortably in his own chair.

Hidden from view, she held a handful of ten sabbacc cards. He too was looking at his own hand. The two of them sat in silence, contemplating their options. For her part, s'Il divided her time between her cards and Vansen's features, studying each facial tick and expression in the hopes of gaining the upper hand. He'd once jokingly accused her of using the Force to read his cards, to which she'd responded that he no doubt had a card-reader built in to his eyepatch so that he could see her hand. Their nattering and bickering was a product of their shared past, and though he was still far older than she, s'Il knew that she was 'no spring nuna' either, as the saying went.

Finally, the Lupine reached forward to pull the topmost flimsi of her pf her pile up before laying it to the side.

"If I win this hand, you have to deal with this."

And with her bet placed, s'Il leaned back once more.

[Vansen Tyree]

Vansen scrunched up his eye, peering to read the inverted aurebesh of the document Loklorien had selected. He wasn't all that practiced at reading upside-down, but he could make out enough of the words to recognise that it was a requisition form from one of the civilian ships - a plea for supplies and spare parts that the Alliance was expected to magic out of thin air.

His jaw clenched. High stakes, he mused to himself, surveying his cards carefully.

He complained of course - he was Rendillian, gods damn it; that was his stereotypical responsibility - but he knew how essential these supplies were. He just wasn't fond of being in the position of having to decline or delay, purely because the Alliance hadn't given him the kind of resources they needed to fend for themselves.

Glancing at the top of his pile, he reached for a flimsi of his own, laying it atop s'Ilancy's bet. "I see your wishlist," he said, careful not to let too much show in his expression, "And raise you a fleet-wide Tactical Readiness Drill."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Her only reaction was a raise of her eyebrows, and s'Il gave him a look from over the top of her eye.

"That's an awful lot of confidence in a Jedi," she teased. It was hollow at best though, as both knew she was more than capable enough to manage what he'd just laid out. They had served in the Clone Wars together through many campaigns, and he was well acquainted with her capabilities.

She looked to her cards once more, considering her options and just what she felt she'd be able to get away with. Slender fingers reached out then, and she picked through her stack until finding her intended target. This she set atop the small pile with a particular sense of flippancy.

"I'll match you with a salvage itemization chart."

Which was, all things considered, a task envied by not a single person within the Wheel. Attempting to list and sort out the endless bits of flotsam and mismatched parts taken from ships and equipment that had to be broken down and parceled away for possible use later was never-ending.

Supremely satisfied with herself, she too held careful control of her outward appearance as she leaned back in her seat once more.

Her mouth opened to speak, but the sound of the door's chime interrupted anything she might've wished to say. A quick gaze was sent over her shoulder before she turned back to Vansen, giving him the look.

[Vansen Tyree]

Vansen through back an innocent shrug. He made no secret of the fact that he loathed and detested the administrative tasks of his current role. However, Vansen was not the sort of officer who ran or hid from his responsibilities, and while he did take lengths to make his more unpleasant duties more tolerable, he wasn't the kind of man to embrace distractions and procrastination. His crew new better than to disturb him without a damn good reason.

He reached for the computer terminal on his desk, and punched in a few instructions that activated the feed from a security camera in the hall. The holo-display embedded in the desk burst into life, projecting an image of his doorway, and the visitor standing outside.

Vansen's gaze flipped back to s'Ilancy. "One of yours," he pointed out, a faint hint of accusation in his voice as he exonerated himself and his crew from disturbing their meeting.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

s'Il paused, her eye locked with his as she considered all the possible reasons why one of her aides would see fit to interrupt herself and the Commodore. There weren't many things she could think of to give cause to an intrusion outside of some sort of emergency, and as Challenger's alarm klaxons remained silent, the Wheel was certainly not in any danger.

Finally she gave a long sigh, folding her cards into one hand while in the same motion rising to her feet. The Jedi gave a light groan as she leaned over Vansen's desk (still careful to make sure that he couldn't see her cards). A quick search and she found the comm access button, pushing it with a sense of mild annoyance.

"I hope this is an emergency."

The holo-image of their guest stiffened, back straightening as he stared straight ahead at the still closed door.

"Ma'am. Priority message from Whaladon."

Now this gave her minor cause to hesitate, and after a moment she spoke once again.

"From who."

"A Mr. Aamoran."

Still perched over Vansen's desk, s'Il weighed her options. On the one hand, she could dismiss the aide and take the message once this meeting was concluded, though on the other...

"Very well. I will be out in a moment."

"Yes Ma'am."

s'Il cut the comm as she straightened back up, sending an apologetic look to Vansen. Her cards she set on his desk, her stack of flimsies taken up instead. Of course, the two that she'd already laid out still sat in the small third pile, untouched.

"I regret that I must cut short this morning's meeting."

[Vansen Tyree]

Vansen bowed his head slightly in understanding; Aamoran was another of the "proper" Jedi who dwelt among the Wheel - one of the handful of veterans from the Jedi Order who'd survived the Purge - and while Tyree had always felt that things were a little off with him, he'd served with enough Jedi to know that they wouldn't summon s'Ilancy away without a damn good reason; especially not a Jedi as tightly wound as Inyos Aamoran.

Like Loklorien had done, he set his cards face-down on the desk; his eye lingered on the pair of flimsis she'd left behind. "That confident in your cards, Master s'Ilancy?"

He shook his head, but couldn't quite keep the smile from tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Isn't overconfidence and arrogance on the list of a million and one things that the Jedi Code of yours forbids you from?"

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Vansen," she tsked in a feigned rebuke.

Her chair was straightened, pushed back to its' original position. Even through the curiosity over Inyos' message s'Il couldn't help but wish that she could stay to continue the game. It had become a ritual that she enjoyed, and she knew well that the Commodore looked forward to their morning gatherings also.

"Stop being a nattering old man, now."

She returned his crooked grin with one of her own as she spoke, and the knuckles of her free hand gently rapped the smooth surface of his desk.

"And do not look at my cards while I am gone."

[Vansen Tyree]

Vansen held up his hands - now empty, his cards placed face-down in front of him - in a gesture of surrender and innocence.

"I'm an old soldier," he reminded her, adding a little extra grizzle into his voice to play up the stereotype even more, "Born in a time when wars were fought honourably by officers and gentlemen."

He waved a hand absently, gesturing vaguely to the Wheel outside, and to the galaxy at large. "It was you Jedi with your clones and your evil wizard politicians and all your secrets and sneaking around -" He said the last two as if they were somehow the worst sins that could anyone could possibly commit. "- that cocked the galaxy up for the rest of us. So don't go projecting your subterfuges on me."

His words were grumpy, but there was warmth in his eye. His hand shoo'd her towards the door. "Same time tomorrow. Don't be late, Jedi."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

s'Il made a face as she turned on her heel lifting her hand in a gesture meant to swipe his words from the air.

With the parting words of "Stop pestering, Vansen," the Lupine left him alone to his own thoughts, stepping through the door to his office and promptly shutting it behind her. Outside, the aide stood stiffly, his hand on a datapad that was quickly extended her way.

"Ma'am."

She nodded in thanks, dismissing him as she herself began the usual trek to her own office. It was not a long walk, but it allowed her enough time to thumb the 'pad on and read the transcript provided. It was a cryptic message to say the least, but she had a healthy enough notion that Inyos would not contact her during her meetings with the Commodore if he'd not had a good reason.

Even as she walked through the door to her small, cluttered bit of territory on Challenger, s'Il remained ever curious.

The flimsies were set atop her desk, and the 'pad on top of them. Skirting around so that she could sit in her chair, the Lupine pushed a small button on the comm panel built in to the desk's smooth surface.

"Send comm request to Emerald Knight."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Were Inyos afflicted by the vice of pride, he would have considered his patience legendary. Even so, with all his training and experience, the long wait between sending his comm request to the Challenger and recieving a response had been frustrating.

The Lieutenant who answered his call had been insistant that Master s'Ilancy and the Commodore not be disturbed; it hadn't been until Inyos had threatened to fly over there himself and disturb them in person that the Rebel officer had finally relented.

Inyos took a moment to calm himself, driving any negativity from his mind and restoring his usual stoic mask. Satisfied that his serenity was in place, he reached for the communications console, and activated the miniature holo-display.

"Master s'Ilancy," he offered in greeting, with a bow of his head.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

She leaned back in her seat as the display burst to life, Inyos' image greeting her formally. With elbows resting on the armrests of her chair, s'Il cut a relaxed figure.

"Inyos."

Pursing her lips, the Lupine went on with an almost grumbled tone to her voice.

"I hope that this is important," she fairly kvetched, and her brow knit as a thought occured to her. "... is Whaladon venting plasma again?"

[Inyos Aamoran]

"No."

He tried to make his voice reassuring, but even if that was a feat he could normally have achieved, his mind was too distracted to succeed now.

"The Whaladon is undamaged," he tried again, without much better results.

His brow furrowed deeply as he considered what to say. He'd spent so many years either avoiding unnecessary contact with others, or without a soul to converse with. It had hardly helped his malformed social graces to develop. Unable to fathom a way to soften the blow, he decided that bluntness was the best course of action.

"I have detected a coded transmission on an old Republic frequency. The transmission appears Jedi in origin, using a military code that expired roughly three months before the end of the Clone Wars."

He paused for a moment, before preempting a possible query. "It is not a frequency that the Challenger monitors; I do not believe they have detected it."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Not quite what she expected, but s'Il still found herself suitably intrigued. Even so, she had to play the devil's advocate in matters such as these as it did more harm than good to take every errant transmission, no matter how old, as high priority. She still had a hefty stack of flimsies to whittle down anyway, given that her normal morning session of 'pass the buck' with the Commodore had been cut short and she'd not been able to offload the more tiresome tasks onto his shoulders. Of course, it was such a give and take game that the two played, trading one headache for another.

"Inyos, it really could be anything. Not to mention the fact that whoever sent it could've been rescued days after putting out their beacon."

And as worrisome a thought as it may've been...

"There's also the possibility that it's a trap, meant to lure us out of hiding. I don't doubt that the Empire has many Old Republic codes, including those used by the Jedi."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos fell silent. What Master s'Ilancy had said was true; but in his mind, risking the life of one broken Jedi was nothing compared to the possibility of rescuing another fugative from Palpatine's purge.

He hadn't called for validation, or for permission.

His head bowed slightly. "You are right of course, Master s'Ilancy; none the less, I plan to investigate this transmission. Alone, if I must. However -"

He trailed off, his hesitation decidedly uncharacteristic. Loklorien s'Ilancy was one of the few beings in the galaxy who knew what had transpired on Ord Ithil: how the journey there had cost Mandan Hidatsa his life, and had cost Inyos a piece of his soul.

Inyos' eyes focused on hers. "- I am not sure I trust myself to complete this mission unacompanied."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Can't complete... " her voice held an almost sing-song quality as she repeated what he'd said.

"I do believe, Mr. Aaamoran, that you are trying to guilt me into joining you."

If Inyos had any inclination to deny her half-hearted accusation, s'Il allowed him no time to do so. She moved on swiftly, her next words a roundabout affirmation that she was sufficiently intrigued, and that that intrigue would most assuredly lead to her participation.

"Does this message give a ship's name?"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Had Inyos realised that such tactics would have been effective, he might have consciously attempted them. He made a mental note to recycle that strategy if the situation ever called for it in the future.

Pushing those thoughts aside, he offered a single nod in response to Master s'Ilancy's question.

"I ran the IFF code through the Republic recognition software aboard my shuttle," he explained, punching in the commands to transmit his findings to s'Ilancy's console aboard the Challenger. "The database identifies the transmission source as an old Jedi Cruiser named the Venture."

He paused for a moment, watching the upload bar slowly fill on his screen. "She went missing during a routine patrol a few months before the Battle of Coruscant; the manifest lists Master Davola and his Padawan among those lost aboard."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

As she waited for the information he'd sent to finish its' transmission of data, s'Il leaned back in her seat, unconsciously resting an elbow on her chair's armrest so that she could lift her hand up to rest at her chin.

She remembered well the Venture, and even before Inyos had spoken Davola's name she knew it'd been his ship.

"I remember Master Davola," she idly mused, her mind now racing.

"A rather... unorthodox teacher if my memory serves me correctly. I seem to recall once confiding in Master Windu that I felt sorry for his Padawan."

Her console gave a small click, and s'Il reached out with her free hand to access the full message that the Emerald Knight had received. It was succinct, and utilitarian as all distress signals went.

"Where did it originate?"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos pulled up a copy of the start charts for local space, and overlayed the positions of the Wheel and the Venture's transmission before bouncing them across to s'Ilancy's console.

"A relatively uncharted system: an automated probe was sent there by the Republic a few hundred years ago, but it was deemed unfit for colonisation, and thus was largely ignored. That entire region is largely devoid of life-sustaining worlds; it wasn't until the Venture was sent there to scout for Separatist activity that the Republic paid it even half a thought."

He paused for a moment, allowing that information to process before answering Master s'Ilancy's inevitable next question.

"The Challenger, Valiant, or Emerald Knight could complete the journey there in approximately seven hours; with the remainder of the Wheel in tow, it would take considerably longer."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

s'Il let a silence hang in the air as she mulled over his last words. It would be unwise to deviate any of the Wheel's larger support craft for an outing of this type, and from what little was known there just wasn't any justification for such an action.

"Emerald Knight is the wisest choice. I cannot in good conscious take anything else that would deprive the convoy of the protection offered by either Challenger or Valiant."

Absently she thumbed through the short transcript of the distress call, eye flicking over each word in quick succession. Time would be short, she decided, and the thought of being able to bring another of the old generation back to the Wheel was enticing enough.

"I will be ready to leave when you arrive."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos offered a curt nod. Sometimes it was a struggle to slow himself enough to engage in these kind of permission-seeking activities. He wasn't impulsive - that had always been Mandan's forté - but he did think quickly, and could consider the possible angles in the blink of an eye. To him, his opinion was the obvious, logical conclusion to draw: and having to repeat those thought processes at normal speed could become a little frustrating.

Still, of the Jedi that Inyos had encountered since coming to the Wheel, he had come to regard Loklorien s'Ilancy as one of the more insightful: better suited to understand his thought processes without undue explanation. Perhaps it was because she was a 'true' Jedi - one trained by the Jedi Order itself, rather than by survivors or pretenders under the shadow of the Purge.

Or perhaps the two of them were just wiser than their fellow refugees.

Regardless, he had stated his case, and she had agreed. That was enough. "I will depart immediately," he stated; and without another word his hand reached out and killed the transmission.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

* * *


The kaleidoscope of swirled star lines was - to most people - a beautiful thing. Streaks of light fading in and out of one another, merging and separating to create a living creature.

To s'Il, it was headache-inducing if she stared for too long. And so for most of the trip she had relegated herself to the Knight's rear sections. The journey had at least provided an amount of quiet uninterrupted by Beren's constant reminders and his bemoaning over the state of her office. Of course, she'd had to cut short her morning meeting with Vansen, and the shameless fantasy of having won every hand they played, and her stack of flimsies gone - placed before him - was a reoccurring thought.

In fact, it was that very same thought that she now allowed herself to fall into, and a satisfied smile had spread over her features. With her eyes closed, she could not Inyos, but she did not need to see him to know that he was there.

"Yes?"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Despite being aboard his own ship, Inyos had the uncomfortable feeling that he was intruding; an unwelcome encroachment on time or thoughts that deserved far more privacy than he was abele to provide.

As soon as Master s'Ilancy had excused herself and ventured aft, he had remained respectfully on the cockpit side of the bulkhead doors; but the passenger space that had been his makeshift home in recent years was hardly a comfortable place to spend so many hours.

"We are a few minutes away," he explained, keeping his words brief and his interruption short. "Since we do not know what awaits us, it might be prudent if you were in the cockpit, away from -" He gestured around the cabin which, though spartan, held the typical clutter of any home. "- unsecured cargo."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

At that she did open her eyes.

"Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine here... "

Her voice trailed off as she caught the look that Inyos sent her way, and another moment of silence settled between them before the Lupine - in a healthy amount of resignation - slowly stood.

"Very well."

Out of instinct she tugged at the edges of her jacket cuffs, and took a step forward.

"Lead the way then."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos didn't waste any time; not that he could have, given that there was only a few metres of raised boarding ramp separating the aft compartment from the cockpit. A momentary concession to archaic chivalry manifested as he reached the cockpit hatch, hitting the keypad and waiting with an arm in the void to allow the lady to enter first.

Without a word, he clambered up into the pilot's seat, and entered the sequence of commands that would disable the autopilot and restore manual helm control. Taking up the slack in the stick, he waited until s'Ilancy had settled herself in the only other seat in he cockpit before reaching for the hyperdrive controls, and slowly easing them back into real space.

Hyperspace exploded, and Inyos braced himself for the inevitable sight of starfield and planets; despite the sketchy information in the astronomical database, Inyos had managed to piece together a rough visual in his mind of what he expected to see.

He never got the chance to determine if he was right or not.

A mere instant after entering the realm of the normal laws of physics, the grating wail of an alarm filled the cockpit. Inyos' eyes were about to fall to the consoles in front of him, intent on determining which system had failed this time; but he realised he didn't need to.

He barely managed to hurl the ship into a portwards roll in time to avoid the chunk of space debris that tumbled into view ahead.

The Emerald Knight dove beneath the rough-edged hunk of durasteel, twisting and ducking as more debris loomed into their path. Inyos was only able to keep half an eye on the proximity sensors as he wove through the cloud of refuse, relying on force of will and will of Force to keep them in one piece.

A few unnerving thuds and scrapes reverberated through the hull; but finally, blissful silence descended through the cockpit as the collision alarms cut off, and the Emerald Knight burst free of the debris field floating in orbit of Helska IV.

Inyos released a breath that he didn't realise he'd been holding. "Are you okay?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder on s'Ilancy's direction.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

White knuckles had gripped the armrests, and s'Il had clamped her eyes shut to avoid actually seeing anything. Her jaw clenched and unclenched. She bit her tongue. And then she swallowed.

Inyos' query was met with silence at first, and s'Il let a few long breaths out from her nose.

Releasing the armrests, she placed flat palms on the console in front of her, her head going down as she slowly opened her eyes.

"Inyos, I may throw up. On you."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos decided to dodge that particular statement, turning his attention back to his controls.

"It would appear that we dropped out of hyperspace into the middle of a debris field," he explained, stating the obvious as he extended the range on the scanners, probing the extent of the wreckage.

A few brief seconds passed as the ship's computer processed it's readings into graphical form. It would take hours for the shuttle to gather enough information about the field to determine exactly what had fragmented in order to create it, but his instincts - based on a few familiar shapes and glanced markings as they'd sped past - had drawn a conclusion much more swiftly.

At least one of the larger fragments had carried the markings of the Confederacy of Independent Systems; and while the debris had spent a few decades dispursing around the planet into makeshift partial rings, the chunks of hull and starfighter made it clear that a Clone Wars battle had been fought in orbit of Helska IV. Inyos wasn't entirely sure who had won.

"The Venture's transmission appears to be coming from the surface," he added over his shoulder. "Sixteen degrees above the equator, and fourty-three degrees spinward of the -"

Inyos' last words were never heard, buried beneath the sound of an explosion striking the ship.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"I don't like this!!!"

Her words, unfortunately, were lost in the dangerous rattling and frenetic chaos that now reigned in the cockpit.Klaxons and warning lights filled her ears and eye, and the Lupine quickly looked away, towards the doorway that led to the rear of the ship. If the danger wasn't so acute, she would've undone her harness and bolted for the much more visually safe confines aft, but as it stood now she was in no position to do that.

"This may be a bad time to tell you this," she managed to get out, "... but I get space-sickness!"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Now was hardly the time to be worried about any psychosomatic movement-enduced nausea; seemingly in answer to his unspoken queries about what the hell was going on, the tactical sensors informed him of what had caused the explosion.

"Shields!" he barked, hoping that Master s'Ilancy would pull herself together enough to operate the console at which she sat.

In the meantime, he threw the thruster controls forward, maxing out the Knight's acceleration and diving back into the evasive opportunities of the debris field.

Forcing calm into his mind, and into his voice, he offered s'Ilancy a brief summary of the information his computer screen was provided. "Whatever battle was fought here, it seems that the Venture neglected to destroy some of the opposition. We are currently being pursued by a Vulture Droid; it would not surprise me if there are more lying dormant elsewhere in the field."

His mind raced, searching through the possibilities and avenues they could take. If his suspicions were correct, and there were more droids lying in wait, ready to activate and attack if they stumbled into range of their proximity sensors, remaining in the field would not be a wise course of action. Normally, Inyos would have no concerns about engaging a single Vulture Droid in combat; but the Emerald Knight was hardly the most agile or best armed of craft, and they had already sustained damage from the initial - and fortunately glancing - salvo.

"We cannot remain in the field," Inyos stated, simply. "We will have to make a break for the planet."

He fell silent for a moment longer.

"The ship is equipped with an aft cannon. Using it would be helpful -" Something tugged at the corner of his mouth. "- provided you can avoid throwing up on the controls, that is."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

It was in that instant that the color drained from her face, and she turned to give Inyos a horrified look. Was he truly serious?! After her confession not moments before, he was suggesting that she man the aft cannon?? Core be blown, she'd go cross-eyed trying to concentrate while her gut did somersaults in on itself!

But, determined to not allow himself the satisfaction of seeing her lose the contents of her stomach, the Lupine doggedly ground her teeth together.

"Very well."

She bit her lip then.

"How do I access it?"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Somewhere in the back of Inyos' mind, a headache began to manifest. Sarcasm reared it's ugly head, and it was only the fact that his jaw was clamped shut with concentration that prevented some sort of retort from springboarding off his tongue. No one except Mandan had ever managed to be quite so frustrating at quite such an inappropriate moment; but unlike Mandan, Inyos doubted that s'Ilancy was attempting to irritate him on purpose.

He drew a breath.

"You see the console marked 'weapons control'?"

Silence descended for a beat.

"Those are the weapons controls."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Oh."

She peeked her good eye open long enough to make out the lettering, and huffed out a breath from her nostrils. And in the next instant, as her fingers ran over the controls in jerky movements, she gave a rather indignant grumble.

"Dan was always the one who insisted on doing things like this."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos tore his attention away from the flight controls for just long enough to throw an exasperated look in her direction.

"You're more than welcome to switch places, if you'd rather I operated the guns, and you concentrated on dodging fire from the precision-engineered killing machine on our tails?"

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Shut up!"

It was an uncharacteristic snap that she delivered, but one that also hearkened back to the old days. She had been more dismissive and anxious so many years ago, and it was as if - right now - she was once more in the cockpit of some small fighter that Dan had managed to cajole her into. And of course, as always, it never seemed to work out as he had intended. Which always left her to clutch her stomach with one hand and cover her mouth with the other.

Just like old times.

But, dogged as ever, the Lupine forced herself to hurriedly acclimate herself to the weapons controls.

The presence of vulture droids was a disturbing reminder of her past, and s'Il ground her teeth together as she concentrated.

[Inyos Aamoran]

Attention returned to flying, Inyos forced the muscles in his jaw to unclench. He couldn't hear the telltale reverberations through the hull of the ship's aft cannon unleashing bolts of plasma towards their pursuer, but with any luck that was because he was flying wild enough to prevent the Vulture Droid from getting into their aft quarter.

For a moment, he allowed his eyes to stray to the proximity sensors. Staying in the field was the best way of avoiding getting shot - making a break for the planet would rob him of any obstacles that he could weave around and evade their robot hunter - but it was only a matter of time before another...

His stomach sank as a new power reading appeared on the sensor grid, half a klick ahead.

"Son of a Sith," he hissed under his breath, jamming the controls hard to port and sending the debris field into a sickening spiral that even the inertial dampeners failed to cope with. Soon, the planet loomed in the viewport ahead of them, but Inyos' evasive flying refused to let it remain still.

He risked another glance at the screen. The first fighter had already peeled off and was in hot pursuit; the second had merely made a minor correction to it's course, and was on their heels as well.

He tried to swallow, but his throat was busy doing a Tatooine impression. "The good news," he managed to say, keeping his voice as calm as he could, "Is that your odds of hitting something just doubled."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Like some mother hen scolding a disobedient child, s'Il huffed just a little as she barely managed to keep the one target in her crosshairs.

"I was under the impression - " she was able to fire off a few shots, but both went wide as her concentration was far from where it should've been.

"... that when I agreed to accompany you, a situation like this was not going to be a worry."

Another few shots, and she clipped one of their pursuers along one wing. It was enough to make the droid wobble on its' axis of rotation, but until she followed up with something a bit more final, it seemed that there would still be two.

[Inyos Aamoran]

"On the contrary, Master s'Ilancy," Inyos countered. "I seem to remember being quite clear about the possible dangers on this trip."

Inyos threw the shuttle into a corkscrew, before breaking sharply into a weaving climb. His plan was to keep their movements as erratic and unpredictable as possible, to prevent the droids chasing them from predicting their course, but it was harder than it sounded: particularly for someone with as structured and predictable a mind as Inyos.

The constant commentary from behind him hardly helped either; but a talkative and distracted gunner was better than no gunner at all, he supposed.

He couldn't help an offhand sarcastic comment, however. "Perhaps you should be thankful that we only have two droid fighters to deal with, and not an entire Imperial battle group."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

His erratic flying not only worsened her condition, but also made it increasingly more difficult to aim. For this the Lupine allowed a slightly more than rankled tone to color her voice.

"Mr. Aaamoran," she ground out between clenched teeth, "... your track record for making bad situations worse is fantastic enough as it is. If you could - "

s'Il fired off a few more shots, then grasped at her armrest with one hand as she felt her stomach flip in on itself.

" - if you could please refrain from making mention of more possible obstacles and trouble, I would greatly appreciate it!"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos wasn't entirely sure what it was in Loklorien's last rant that had done it, but she had managed to thoroughly get under his skin, and was now crawling around like an army of buzz droids intent on sabotaging every last one of his freying nerves.

He swung around in his chair, a definate snarl gracing his features. "Will you please -"

The end of his sentence was drowned out by noise. Detecting the briefest hesitation in the Emerald Knight's evasive flying, the droid fighters exploited their opportunity to pump crimson bolts of blaster energy into the shuttle's hind-parts. Power conduits overloaded and ruptured as the shields collapsed under the onslaught; it was only a mix of quick thinking and instinct that threw the shuttle into a crazed new tangle of dodges and rolls, and saved them from certain destruction.

Eyes firmly focused on flying - angry both at himself for succoming to irritation, and at Master s'Ilancy for being such a terrible copilot - he strained against the controls as the shuttle fell into the planet's gravity well, vibrating violently against the heat and friction as they entered the atmosphere.

"This could get interesting," he muttered, darkly.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

'Interesting' was not the choice of words that she would've chosen to use, but Inyos had spoken, and until they landed in relatively one piece, she would hold her tongue. Afterwards however she would be sure to give him every piece of her mind that she saw fit - starting with his less-than-lovely brand of 'luck'.

Of course, the more pressing matter of the planet's gravity taking hold - and its' affects on her stomach - now occupied her thoughts completely. She felt as though her guts were being twisted in on themselves, and the Lupine clamped her jaws shut as her hands went out to steady herself against the most available piece of non-violently-shaking equipment.

She breathed through her nose, and in a last effort to maintain her dignity, s'Il let herself fall into as calm a meditation as she could muster. It helped, but only marginally, and the Jedi pushed herself back in her seat as the Knight dipped unexpectedly, sending her stomach plummeting to the bottom of her seat.

[Inyos Aamoran]

A siren began to wail in the cockpit - an automated subroutine put in place just in case anyone aboard hadn't noticed that they were hurtling towards a planet at high speed. With every klick they hurtled through, the flight controls began to shudder with increased fury - a feedback response designed to make the digital controls feel more like manual and mechanical inputs, but that currently made a controlled descent nigh impossible: at best, they were falling with style.

Their saving grace was the atmosphere. On many worlds, a thick atmosphere would have been even more devastating for the shuttle, as the denser air turned their durasteel hull into a fireball. On Helska IV the Knight was spared much of that; but a lack of friction meant a lack of decceleration, and even if they did somehow survive all the way to the ground, they wouldn't last long if the faster impact punctured the hull and vented their precious breathable air.

Somehow, Inyos managed to tilt the ship, aiming the repulsorlift generators towards the ground; not an easy task without an atmosphere for the shuttle's winglets to grab hold of.

The controls didn't seem to cope with it any better than Inyos' muscles: a shower of sparks errupted from the console, and pain blossomed in Inyos' hand.

The ground grew ever larger through the viewport window. Cradling his arm close to his body, Inyos turned to Master s'Ilancy, sadness filling his eyes.

"I'm sorry."

A moment later, the ground rose up to meet them. Silence fell.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Yet in that silence was the siren call of the Force.

The elder Lupine reached out with her thoughts and will in desperation, pulling the intangible toward herself and Inyos. If either had a chance to survive, only the Force would keep them in the land of the living. It would shield them, give them shelter from the maelstrom of disaster that was rising up to greet them with terrible ferocity.

She heard his voice, and though she could not see the saddened look in his eyes, his tone conveyed his regret to such a degree that she could feel it. She could smell it on him even. It was a tangible thing that she was unwilling to acknowledge.

No sorrow, she mouthed, twisting in her seat. Her arms lifted, fingers releasing the armrests as they reached for Inyos, and a split second before impact they met both sides of his face in an unbreakable grip.

We survive...

The Force blossomed around them both as the Lupine pulled upon her very essence, drawing everything in and channeling it out. It was a living shield, and she pulled Inyos into its' protective walls even as the horrific sounds of screeching metal twisted their way into the silence.

[Inyos Aamoran]

There was a proverb that drifted around the galaxy: no one knew where it had begun, but everyone knew what it said. It prophecised that when you were about to meet your end, your whole life would flash before your eyes. For some, it was a dance of happy memories - of warm emotions that reminded them of just how blessed they had been by life. For others, it was a tragic list of wasted opportunities and immoral acts: enough to shake those who lived into changing their ways, and remaking themselves for the better. For Inyos however, it was something different.

As the world around him literally ripped itself apart, the world inside did the same.

Memories cascaded - and while his most noble and most heinous acts all played out before his mind, they quickly drowned within the endless blackness of Ord Ithil. He did not feel pride or joy; nor did he feel fear or anger. Instead he felt an empty void: the black hole of wasted years that had been stolen from him by that terrible place. In his mind, all the good - and even all the bad - he had brought into the galaxy was undone, paled into insignificance by that world of never-ending night.

The shriek of the shuttle's hull buckling under the impact, and the thunderfall of snow as the surface they'd crashed into rained back down upon them cut through the sanctum of Force that Loklorien had surrounded them in. Silence tried to fall again, but the battered ship threw up a resistance, creaks and rumbles peppering the background as the Emerald Knight groaned in pain at it's injuries.

Inyos forced his eyes open; turned his attention to Master s'Ilancy; heard his lips utter: "Are you alright?" But his mind was elsewhere; distracted, addled.

There was another proverb that drifted the galaxy: every man has his demons to bear.

Inyos Aamoran's demons had just been shaken loose.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Her body and mind both had been battered to such an extent that she could utter nothing in response. With both of her hands still firm upon the sides of his face, she stared wide-eyed at his features, watched his lips move to form words. Words of inquiry. Words that she could not hear. Each muscle in her body screamed its' own rage and pain, but her own physical hurt paled in comparison to the great chasm that she'd felt ripped open within the man she now stared at.

Their world was slow in coming back to life - each grown and shudder of the Knight seemed as though it had become nothing but a stutter in time. A distant place that seemed so far away.

A small shower of snow fell between their two faces, having made its' way inside from the destroyed transparisteel cockpit viewshield.

She felt the first biting pangs of cold, but paid them no mind.

It seemed like an eternity that the two lay where they'd falled, side by side, facing each other, and s'Il's fingers twitched, digging ever so slightly more into Inyos' head.

"Where... " her voice came out in a whisper, strained and almost breathless as she fought for control of her own body, to keep from simply releasing him and curling into herself.

"Where have... where have you been... "

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos' emotional defenses closed him off instantly, but unlike the usual blast door protection that they offered, it felt more like he'd tried to slam a door in a rancor's face: try as he might, he couldn't force them completely closed.

"That's a long story," he grunted, his tone not quite as detached and precise as it normally was. "One better left for a time when we aren't in such imminent danger."

He moved a little, freeing himself from Lok's vice-grip on his skull, and felt a wave of pain radiate from his shoulder. He thought about applying his usual mental techniques to keep the sensation at bay, but instead he relished in it; if nothing else, the pain kept him distracted from the mental doorway that he couldn't quite close.

With a grunt, he heaved himself away from the floor. The cockpit sloped at an odd angle, which made clambering up to the controls all the more difficult. He managed - barely - wedging himself atop the twisted remains of what used to be a chair, his arm twisted at odd angles as he jabbed at keys and switches.

The console flickered, groaning and struggling to awaken like a reluctant child. Between the stuttering flashes of static across the scene, Inyos pieced together snatches of the bad news; an ever worsening list of systems failing, damaged, or powerless.

His fingers curled into a fist, and slammed into the transparisteel screen, adding a jagged crack to the display's disarray. He drew a breath to calm himself; it made little difference.

"We should get out of here," he uttered, his voice thready. "The air is too thin to survive long on the surface, but there are denser pockets beneath the ice. We'll need -" He stopped, pausing while he refilled his lungs as best he could. "- the life support gear we brought with us."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

His broken contact brought with it a jarring return to reality. What had seemed so distant was now imminent and demanding her attention. Every muscle screamed its' protest, and the sudden release of the Force - once so protecting - was a terrible fall for her mind. To be thrust so quickly back into the world of Helska IV made her groan. Her exertion had sapped her body, drained her mental strength, and left her a nearly empty shell capable only of doing its' best to recover.

Curling in on herself, the Lupine relegated herself to what oxygen she could breath in.

"Yes," she managed to gasp out between breaths.

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos clambered upwards towards the aft section, heaving himself awkwardly over the twisted wreckage. It took a few moments before he even remembered that the Force was there to assist him - a sure sign that the lack of oxygen was starting to have a detrimental effect.

Thoughts floated around his mind, leaking through the ajar mental door. He thought back to an airlock, decades ago, where Mandan Hidatsa's practiced flair with the Force had allowed him to manipulate the very electrons in the circuitry, and release the deadbolts holding it closed. Inyos had neither the precision nor the focus to perform anything with such finesse; instead he opted for a brute force approach, mixing muscle and mental powers to heave the hatch aside.

The aft section almost looked worse than the cockpit, if such a thing was possible. Crates of supplies, equipment, and spare parts that had been neatly stowed and secured had been shaken free, showering their contents everywhere. Ration packs had split and leaked; mixed with the scent of coolant and fuel, they smelt even less appetising than normal.

From the carnage he managed to snatch one of the life support boxes that they'd liberated from the pilots' stores. A few minutes of rummaging uncovered the second; the shattered casing and infrequent sparks suggested that it was in less than working order. With a grunt he floated the working unit downwards towards Loklorien, retrieving a rebreather mask for himself instead. It wouldn't help as much, or for as long, but it was better than nothing.

"Here," he called to s'Ilancy, adding a bundle of thick thermal gear to the equipment being sent her way. "Put these on - you'll need them."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

With outstretched hands she grasped the small medical case, bringing it as close as she could to her body. A moment later her arm shot out once more to pull the thermal gear inward as well.

She sat up then, an awkward effort filled with protesting limbs, creaking joints, and a few groans - it was in no way graceful. Strands of hair fell into her face as she leaned forward to separate the upper and lower portions of the gear he'd given her, and slowly the Lupine began to pull the top on over her head. The trousers came next.

Getting to her feet proved a much more daunting task than the simple act of sitting up, but with dogged determination s'Il pulled herself up. With one hand grabbing at the edge of the console, she slowly rose to stand fully.

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos grabbed a few more handfuls of items that seemed potentially useful and vaguely intact, bundling them all into a slightly torn kit bag. Sealing it shut and dropping it down into the cockpit below, he allowed himself to follow, using the Force to cushion his defence... though not quite as much as he would have liked. Clearly, hypoxia was having a much bigger impact on his concentration than he was prepared to admit.

Retrieving his own set of thermals and beginning to hastily tug them on, he turned his gaze in s'Ilancy's direction. "Any damage?" he asked, giving her a quick visual once-over for any blood patches of protruding bones.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Nothing exceptionally horrible, no."

Standing carefully, she made sure her footing was solid before letting go of the console she was using for balance.

"The smaller scrapes and bruises will mend themselves well enough in short time," she gave a once-over around the small bridge, grimacing at the sight.

"Unfortunately I do not think that your ship is quite so lucky as us."

There was a faint undercurrent of concern lacing her words, as s'Il continued to sweep her gaze across the mechanical carnage before her.

"There is an emergency beacon aboard, yes?"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos nodded, slowly.

"There is," he admitted. "It was part of the comm array that was completely totalled when we -" He trailed off. "- landed."

He frowned, rummaging through the supplies he'd recieved for a boxy tranciever array, almost as big as his head. Fumbling through the gloves he'd already foolishly put on, he tugged out the twin antennae - a good two feet of slender, slightly bent metal - and prodded at the controls until the device switched on.

A sigh of relief escaped him as a blip appeared on the screen. "I have a fix on the distress call we picked up; not too far from here. The Challenger should still be monitoring that frequency; if we can get there and modify the transmission, we should be able to call for a rescue."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

She was moving in the next instant, picking her way through the rubble-strewn bridge.

"Then we must hurry. Our time is short; I'd rather not waste what little of it that we have."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos hesitated, but only for the briefest of moments. He'd considered deferring to formality and allowing the lady to leave the ship first, but considering that he was the one carrying the scanner that would lead them to their destination, that hardly made any sense at all.

With the way that the ship had fallen, escape through the boarding hatch was unfeasable. Fortunately, the impact had opened a potential new exit where the forward viewport had once been. Draping the leatherette strap of the tranciever across his shoulders, he clambered up onto the forward consoles and, with a mixture of lightsaber and Force, tore open an exit large enough for them to use.

He turned, lowering a gloved hand to s'Ilancy. "Try to keep up," he said, his voice slightly muffled by thermal gear. "But shout out if you can't."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Taking his hand in a firm grip, s'Il allowed him to help her up onto the console. For a moment the two stood looking out at the desolation before them, at the frigid landscape. The skyline was a blur of white, land and sky belnding seemlessly into one, and the Lupine frowned as she huffed out a slightly amused breath.

"No need to worry over me," she let her frown shift up into a crafty, unseen smirk.

"I can keep up well enough."

With a gloved pat to his shoulder, she nimbly dropped from the wreckage to the ground.

"So long as you get us to where we need to be, that is."

[Inyos Aamoran]

With a little force thrown in to help his descent, Inyos leapt down, landing in a comfortable crouch beside her.

"I guarentee nothing," he countered absently, eyes scrutinising the sensor readout.

He turned a little, watching the way the reading moved across the display as he did so. For a moment he was struck by how absurd it was that, after thousands of years of space travel, this was the most compact model of signal tracker available to the Rebels on the Wheel. One would have expected a world where a device the size of a comlink had the processing power of an astromech, could surf the holonet wirelessly, and stored hours of video and audio for nothing more than the simple convenience of having them around. Perhaps one day, a long time from now, the galaxy's engineers might finally get the hang of miniaturisation.

In the meantime, finding the transmission source was the main priority. Inyos reached out with a thermal-wrapped arm, pointing towards the horizon. "That way," he announced.

His apparent confidence faltered slightly. "I think."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Studying him with an amused eye, s'Il tugged on the sleeve of her thermal jacket as if the act would warm her. She looked in the direction he pointed, and had taken only one step before stopping immediately to the sound of the two words 'I think'.

"You think?"

She frowned then, looking from Inyos to the way he'd gestured.

"Please make sure that you're not holding that thing upside-down."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos shot her an incredulous look; it was hard to be sure if such a comment was intended to be humerous, or merely reflected a complete lack of faith in his abilities or common sense. He chose to assume neither, ignoring her request entirely.

"There is a great deal of magnetic interference," he explained, marching off in the direction he had indicated as a sign of his own relative confidence. Every few paces he glanced at the screen, arms subtly twisting the device in the hopes of catching a glimmer of stronger signal. "Since the signal is electromagnetic in nature, this device is having trouble resolving enough information to discern a range, or an exact bearing."

"From above, there would have been significantly less interference; I had hoped to maintain altitude long enough for us to get an exact fix before we disembarked."

He turned his head to s'Ilancy, his delivery of the words clumsy as he tied something that Mandan Hidatsa had insisted upon far too often. "I do not believe that the debris field 'got the memo'."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

She gave him a strange look before turning her gaze back to the direction that they were headed.

"Well, we're here now," she grumped, "... best to do what we can with what we have."

It was as the Force willed, she knew. But it still did not make trudging through a snowstorm any less uncomfortable or frustrating.

"We were once stationed on Hoth," the Lupine began absently, "... it was a long time ago - before Echo Base. No one really wanted to go there, but Dan insisted it was of strategic value and so we went."

She huffed out a breath, then went on.

"It was cold and miserable, and contrary to how holos make it look, riding a taun taun through a blizzard is in no way heroic. In fact if you weren't careful they'd unseat you with one quick turnabout. But we were there, and so we did what we had to do."

A pause, as she remembered something in particular.

"I recall one commando saying he was going to go into business after the war, and start selling flavored ice sticks shaped like wampas, and call them 'Hoth Pops'."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos' boots creaked and crunched their way through snow, carving as close a path as he could to the vector described by his tranciever. While the falling snow was not enough to completely rob them of a point of reference, the ongoing monochrome ground beneath them did make it much more difficult to tell one piece of terrain from another. Were it not for a decade of practice aimlessly wandering the ruins of Ord Ithil, and the gentle guidance of the Force towards sure footing, injury would swiftly have been added to insult.

His senses strained, slicing through the sound of the snowfall in search of the cracks and creaks that would give warning of the ice becoming thinner beneath their feet. Water was as fickle and unpredictable when frozen as it was in vast oceans; though it seemed benign and stable, shifting currents of ice and snow could carve deep crevasses that were easily stumbled into, or caverns topped with only the thinnest layer of ice that might shatter beneath bodyweight and send them plumetting to their deaths.

Again, he reminded himself, and refined his thoughts accordingly. One plumet to the death per day is more than enough.

Loklorien's words mixed in with the ambient sound, muted as they tumbled through the thin air. He strained harder still, trying to pick between one sound and another; but to no avail.

He turned, feeling a wave of unbidden frustration swelling inside him; he forced it down before he spoke, though he was unsure how successful his efforts to disguise it had been. "Master s'Ilancy," he said, as diplomatically as he could muster, "It would be wise to keep our conversation to a minimum, if we wish to stave off hypoxia for as long as possible."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

She did not answer verbally, but her expression was enough to cast upon him a look of amusement. Of course, in the same moment the Lupine came to a sudden standstill, her arm lancing out to grab at the neckline of Inyos' thermal jacket and tighten into an iron grip...

... just as his next step broke the paper-thin layer of ice in front of him.

Shards of crystalline fragments cascaded down into a now-yawning chasm of emptiness, and as s'Il jerked Inyos back with a quick pull, she let him stand on solid ground for a few moments.

"That commando died a month later," she continued her story as if he'd not said a word.

"He had an argument with an officer, and left on his perimeter rounds as agitated as I've ever seen a man. Stepped on one of the mines that were along the outer edges of the marker points."

The Lupine sent her gaze to the now gaping hole before them.

"Don't let outside frustrations get the better of you," she gave a smile, "... and in return I will talk only when necessary until we are no longer in such dire straights."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos bristled; or at least, he felt the sensation that he had imagined whenever he had heard that term used. Frustration scurried around under his skin like insects; while he should have felt gratitude towards the Jedi for having stopped him in time, he merely felt annoyance that she had distracted him, making it necessary in the first place.

He forced a wave of calm to wash over him, sweeping the crawling insects back into the corners of his mind. "That sounds like an acceptable compromise," he agreed, with a slight bow of his head.

Tracking sideways onto more stable ice, he led them onwards, continuing their slow progress in silence through the featureless wastes. His features remained fixed in a faint frown of concentration; it deepened as an indicator flashed on his tranciever.

He stopped, helding up a hand to ensure that s'Ilancy did the same. He regarded the display with scrutiny; changed settings; but the indication persisted.

He glanced towards his companion, gesturing off into the distance with a gloved paw. "I am picking up a large metallic object, which seems to be the origin of the transmission. It may just be debris fallen from orbit; but hopefully it'll provide us with some shelter."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"I hope that it can."

Peering around Inyos, she too looked to the tranciever. What she saw was merely a jumble of scrawling letter and numbers though, and the Lupine gave a frown before huffing out a breath through her nose. It made no sense to her, and s'Il wasted no time in returning her eye to what lay before them. She tested the air, reaching out with her senses in search of what Inyos had found.

"Come along then," she murmured while stepping past him.

Now in the lead, the Lupine was mindful to keep her awareness split - intent on making progress toward the object, and caution in the path that she forged through the snow. They began up a snowy incline, a gradual ascent that she noted culminated in a ridge about fifty yards away.

She led quietly, turning to look every so often at Inyos to make sure that he still followed, and more than once she would pause as if in thought before skirting around an invisible danger lurking beneath the snow ahead.

Reaching the crest, s'Il slowed to a stop at the highest point. The snowfall seemed less concentrated the higher they'd gone, While still falling, it did not obstruct their vision as much as it had when they were in the 'valley' below.

She waited until Inyos stood beside her. He was still looking down at his tranciever, and she couldn't help the wry smile tugging at her lips. Reaching out, she placed two gloved fingers below his chin to lift it up and set his eyes in the same direction that she now looked.

Two hundred yards away, like some monstrous, age-long dead carcass half-buried in drifting snow dunes, was the unmistakable shape of an old Venator. She was at an angle, listing to port as her starboard superstructure rose from the blanket of snow and her nose tipped up into the sky. One of the command towers was all but gone, though the other clearly visible even through the falling snow.

Even the red accent lines were still visible in places, and s'Il found herself looking back in time.

She smiled.

"I think we have found the origin of your transmission."

[Inyos Aamoran]

While Inyos was a man of few words, that was only because he used words sparingly as a matter of choice. Seldom did situations leave him without anything to say; he wasn't the sort of man who succame to emotion, sentimentality, or nostalgia.

Perhaps it was the crash, or the lack of oxygen; but this time, he did succome. The Challenger had become something of a welcome and familiar sight - not only a representation of his new home, but a remnant of his old life as well - but that did not lessen the significance of finding one of her sisters. This one was damaged - Inyos could pick out the remnants of blaster scorches along the hull - but the fact that it had survived it's impact with the planet in one a large and still mostly recognisable piece was a testament to the engineers who had designed and built her. She'd certainly fared better than the Emerald Knight had done.

"It would seem that we have," Inyos finally agreed, his tention torn away from the shuttle to regard the tranciever once again.

A frown flashed across his features as he decoded the stream of data displayed in front of him. "That is most odd," he said quietly, adjusting some of the settings. "It is hard to get a conclusive reading through the interference, but the power emissions from the wreck seem too high."

Inyos shot s'Ilancy a look. "The distress transmitter may not be the only thing still functioning within."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Leaning over to look at what Inyos was seeing on his tranciever, s'Il made a face. It was always a habit, and the Lupine straightened back up in the wasted effort of her curiosity.

"If that is the case," her gaze moved to their more immediate surroundings and the best method of beginning their trek downwards, "... then we best be on to see what it is exactly that your piece of machinery is telling you might be in there."

One foot going before the other, s'Il began the descent at a pace that was in no way rushed, but it was not a slow pace either that she set.

After all - it was cold out here, and more on her mind than what might lay inside the wreckage waiting for them was the fact that the probability of heat was a welcome thought. If the distress beacon was working, then hopefully other systems were still functional, and the Lupine Jedi beckoned to Inyos, though it was an action that she knew was unnecessary, as he was already following her footsteps.

A thought occurred to her, and she made a wry expression that none could see.

"We'll have to alter the distress beacon; change it to an Alliance frequency and reword the message."

[Inyos Aamoran]

"Dear Commodore Tyree," Inyos muttered to himself, allowing his attention to deviate more frequently from the tranciever screen, now that they knew roughly where they were heading.

Hopping between ice-covered hillocks and frozen chunks of debris, he was silently glad that the boots he wore were somewhat more practical than those that came with his traditional Jedi attire; the military treads made navigating terrain considerably less perilous.

"A group of nasty droid fighters shot us down. We are now huddling in the wreck of a derelict Star Destroyer. Please rescue us. Love, the Jedi."

A grunt escaped from him; were his arms not already occupied holding the tranciever and maintaining his balance, he would have succomed to the urge to fold them disapprovingly across his chest.

"The Rebels will have a field day."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

She waved his proposed message away with a flippant hand, making a face that spoke to her amusement at his choice of words.

"Oh heavens no, I do not think it wise to word it quite like that."

Careful to keep her footing on solid ground, the Lupine meandered her way through a sparsely touched field of wreckage that'd peeled away from the once-noble Venator when she kissed terra firma one last time.

The closer they came, the higher its' hulk loomed in the air.

"I think it better if we accurately frame what needs to be said through a filter that the Commodore will understand."

She smiled inwardly.

" 'Commodore - it seems that we have fallen victim to a Klatooinian mud leech, and require your help in rectifying the situation we now find ourselves in. Your haste in aiding us with our current circumstance would be most appreciated, and we assure you that we will be as eternally grateful for your prompt response... ' "

There was a pause, as she very nearly laughed aloud at the memory, but kept her voice level as she finished.

" '... as much as you were for mine.' "

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos wrinkled his nose at the thought. Mud leeches from Klatooine were a blood-sucking parasite known for attaching itself to uncomfortable parts of mammalian anatomy with a high concentration of blood flow. Inyos felt that he'd just stumbled upon a decidedly uncomfortable piece of intimate knowledge about Commodore Tyree, and was absolutely sure that he wished he did not know it.

Not for the first time, he wondered what kind of strange circumstances had led to the unusually intimate relationship between Master s'Ilancy and the Rebel Officer; a relationship that, to the outside observer, seemed as much disgruntled and antagonistic as it was good natured and friendly. There was quite a story there, no doubt.

And he was absolutely sure he didn't want to know that one, either.

"If memory serves," Inyos said, with enough of an edge in his tone to decisively steer the conversation back to the infinately more important task at hand, "We should be able to gain access to the ship via an airlock on deck seventeen. That area of the ship looks reasonably intact."

A twist of discomfort in his gut compelled him to glance at the tranciever again, but the display was still too disrupted by interference to offer any kind of useful information. He felt his vision tugged by paranoia towards the jagged shapes of debris and terrain: shadowed places where all manner of sinister things could be lurking and watching with malicious intent.

He forced himself to remember that Helska IV was completely uninhabited.

"This way," he added finally, gesturing towards the appropriate part of the ship; Master s'Ilancy still nominally in the lead, the two Jedi trudged away; the ground transforming from snow to durasteel beneath their boots.

In one of those ignored shadowed places however, something lurked.

And watched.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

The closer to the old Venator they got, the more cautious they had to be with their footing. Certainly not treacherous, but there was an amount of care that had to be exercised.

She let her senses roll outward, hoping to find something...

Her pace did not change, even as the shadow cast by the long-dead war giant swallowed them up. Her voice was low; almost noncommittal even.

"We are being watched."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos kept his voice equally calm; that s'Ilancy had sensed it too was unsettling in a way, but at least he could take some solace in the fact that he wasn't completely paranoid and crazy.

"Helsa IV has no indiginous flora or fauna," he offered casually, his pace and tone matching Loklorien's in the hope that they might fool whatever was beholding them into believing they were not aware of it's presence.

He reached out with his senses again, but the feeling was too diffuse: too vague to divine any real indication of where their observer lurked.

"All the more reason to get out of the open, and onto a more stable footing, wouldn't you agree?"

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"I would."

She kept her gait measured, yet with enough of an urgency that hinted at the desire for shelter. It was a calculating symphony of movements that, like Inyos', would hopefully disguise the knowledge that they were being watched.

A cavernous, gaping hole in the Venator's hull loomed before them, offering protection from the outside elements, and s'Il skirted her way around a particularly large chunk of twisted and broken bulkhead.

"Let's hurry. Our time is short."