Relics: Precious Cargo

[Black Talon]

Takodana

An alarm sounded through the cockpit. The barest fraction of a second later it repeated, echoed through the speakers built into the pilot's helmet. A string of aurebesh characters flickered across the holographic heads-up display behind the helmet's polarised lenses.

Proximity Alert. Gravity Field Detected.

No shit.

The control yoke shuddered violently beneath Black Talon's hands as he wrestled with the servos that instilled the controls with artificial feedback. Every stick, every button, every lever was digital, the inputs processed by sophisticated computers. But pilots couldn't fly that way. Pilots needed to feel what they were doing; they needed the control responses to match the way their fighter was misbehaving. Right now, Black Talon's TIE/sf was misbehaving, stubbornly refusing to do anything but a slow leftwards bank towards the upper atmosphere of Takodana, the yoke fighting his efforts to steer away with all their simulated might.

Another indicator flashed up on one of the displays scattered around his peripheral vision. The hyperdrive was disabled. Damaged by laser fire no doubt; the exit from hyperspace must have been the one last shock required to shake it loose beyond the boundaries of functionality. He was no mechanic, but he'd turn an eye to it later; maybe something could be patched, to restore his TIE Fighter to interstellar functionality again. He'd worry about that once he was on the ground.

Assuming he survived all the way until then.

At least the scopes were blessedly empty. Or rather, they were empty of First Order transponder signals, and that was enough. There were an assortment of other craft showing on his screens, but Black Talon didn't believe the validity of all of them. Takodana was a pirate haven, a wretched hive of smugglers, spice runners, and bounty hunters. Somehow he doubted that the IFF signals claiming to be a Republic medical frigate and her authorised escorts were entirely genuine. Not that it mattered now. There wasn't time to be looking behind him: the vast green orb that had quickly come to dominate his viewport demanded his undivided attention.

Something ruptured as his TIE caught the thickening surface of Takodana's atmosphere, the controls too unresponsive for the pilot to shallow off his trajectory. Entering an atmosphere was no simple matter: too steep and the friction could shatter you into debris; too shallow and you might skip off back into space, which was not the place you wanted to be in a battered and limping starfighter. From the damage the ship was taking, Talon's course seemed to be much closer to the former of the two bad options; his fist pounded against the breather unit on his chest, activating the back-up life support native to his suit. The events that had allowed air to seep in from the fighter's onboard life support sealed in an instant, shielding Talon's lungs from the wisps of smoke and coolant that tried to creep in. The same button would prepare his suit for egress, priming the magnetic seals that would keep him warm if he exited the craft into hard vacuum, and charging the mechanisms that would hurl his ejection seat clear of the fighter if needed. But not yet. He was too high for an EVA pilot to survive reentry, and yet too low for the seat to boost him back up into a stable orbit.

"Hold together," he whispered quietly to the TIE Fighter, his voice muffled within the confines of his helmet. He wasn't sure why the unprofessional words were leaving him; but then there was so much about today that defied the expectations of logic. "You can do it, girl. Just hold together."