With our target more or less located, we settled in to wait for the rest of our reinforcements to arrive. The repairs had taken just a bit longer than anticipated, but they were already on their way, so we didn't have too long to wait.
Rather than sit around and waste our time away, the whole team got together to do some light sparring. While Ahsoka and I may have already been training to keep our edge sharp and to help me get back into the groove of using a shield, the rest of the team also had new weapons, and not all of them had a lot of experience with them. After coming up with a final design for our beskar-lined vibroblades and putting a few prototypes through the wringer, Miru and her team had done a limited custom run for 1st Group. These were all made by hand and our production facilities, as our order for parts had yet to arrive.
The final version of our new combat knives used just thirty grams of beskar, an incredibly low number that was only possible because of Clan Syr's armorer working on the project. Despite the low amount, the weapon was more than capable of punching through beskar and plenty of other armor types. It wasn't slicing through like butter or anything like that, not even my sword could do that, but it was still a viable anti-beskar weapon. The only problem was most of the team didn't have a lot of official experience wielding knives or daggers.
While Vaz had plenty of training using knives and short-bladed weapons, and Nal had some experience, it was well worth our time to work on dusting off and spreading those skills around, making sure everyone, even Ahsaoka and I, could handle fighting with the lethal blade. We ended up spending a day off and on training, with Vaz and I leading the lessons, since Nal's knife skills were more learned as he went style than actual teachings, and Ahsoka's training about non-lightsaber blades was sparse.
Eventually, when the arrived at our deep space location, we shared the knowledge we had gained and discussed some possible scenarios and their associated plans. Most of those plans, at least for everyone but the ground teams, boiled down to "Wait for our signal," which would either be me contacting them to come in for support or it would be the emergency signal, in which case they would come in guns blazing.
Once everything was planned out and prepared, the whole conglomerate fleet made another jump, this time heading for deep space near our target, close enough that a single micro-jump would put the fleet right on the target's doorstep. It didn't take too long, less than a full day, as we had already gotten pretty close while we were waiting. Once we arrived, we began shuffling around our people, bringing the Corvak's team onto the before starting the final leg of our journey, a jump into the system, as stealthily as we could.
Despite making one final jump, we still had quite some time to travel at sublight speeds. While the hyperspace signature was pretty small, it would still be pretty obvious if we dropped out too close to our target. That meant around six hours spent creeping up on our target planet, the ball of rock and gas getting bigger and bigger as we approached. The entire thing was one big ball of green and yellow, a swirling, never-ending storm of gasses so caustic and toxic that they would eat the flesh from most species' bones in just a few hours.
Luckily, our armor was more than enough to handle the dangerous storm, though they would need to be carefully washed when we returned.
Eventually, the parked in a field of debris around the planet, taking cover in one of the larger, metal-heavy hunks of space trash. When we were given the all-clear by our sensors, we deployed and climbed onboard the our trusty, heavily modified stealth shuttle, bringing us down to the planet's surface.
The trip was longer than strictly necessary, with Nal working to keep the reactor and thruster power down to reduce our sensor profile. We slid down into the atmosphere a substantial distance from where my was directing us so that we could come in along the planet's surface, rather than directly down on them. Once we were in the planet's atmosphere, we could finally see the surface, and it did not disappoint.
The ground was barren, rocky, and covered in massive spires that seemed to spring out of nowhere. These pillars of stone were near pitch black in color, contrasting with the worn, grey ground they jutted out from. Interspersed between the spires were massive, vast calderas, long dormant shells of once-active volcanoes, sometimes miles wide. It was an impressive sight, and it made me very happy that we were here while the planet was dead rather than a still bubbling, magma-covered hellscape.
Once we were in position, we ran a low-energy scan for some sort of cover, eventually landing the by a small cave created by two massive spires of rock, one collapsed against the other. When we disembarked, we took cover in the cave, carrying several crates of equipment with us.
When the took off again, we sealed the cave with an environmental barrier and purged the area of the planet's atmosphere. This would allow us to live off of a rebreather system rather than the spare tanks of bottled air we also brought with us. We still had to keep our helmets on, of course, since accidents could happen and the environmental barrier could fail, but it was nice to have a clean-ish area to sit in, the whipping wind and horrible gas held at bay.
About five hours after we finished getting set up, the came by again, this time dropping off the BX ground team. The sixteen battle droids quickly entered the cave, heading to the back and powering down, folding up to reduce how much space they took up. The leader, a relatively new BX droid painted blue with our logo on its chest, saluted me as the rest moved through.
"BX-182 reporting for duty, sir," It said in the usual robotic voice. "All units are in optimal condition and ready for combat."
"That's good. Head to the back with the rest and enter low power mode," I ordered. "We will wake you when we are ready to move. And change your designation to… how about Blink?"
"Confirmed, designation 'Blink' accepted," the droid acknowledged, before turning back and heading to the rest of the squad.
Once the droids were settled, we settled in to wait as well. It was boring, of course, except when we gave eating rations a go, being very careful to avoid contamination while also finishing quickly so as to not tempt fate. Thankfully we managed to avoid anything terrible, though Julus did require some cautious washing and a bit of healing when he managed to somehow burn his cheek. Luckily, Racer didn't have to worry nearly as much about contamination, meaning he could scrap and clean the sight easily, letting me fix the damage.
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When Corvak and his team finally joined us, we quickly broke down our setup and stored it on board the , before immediately heading out across the barren landscape. We had three days worth of oxygen in total, and while that was plenty to reach our destination with at least a day remaining, we were not keen to push this particular timetable.
Traveling through the empty, broken wastes was incredibly difficult. Rapid shifts in the wind would frequently make it hard to progress at all for ten or fifteen minutes, the wind pushing us around and forcing us to hunker down. Then, the gale-force winds would vanish like they never happened, leaving us a bit dazed.
On top of that, walls of dense clouds would roll across the land, a deep, horrible-looking that was dense enough to cause noticeable resistance. It also obviously cut visibility down drastically, bringing it to almost zero. Thankfully, our armor protected us from the effects of the fog, but it still slowed our progress to a crawl. We had to rely on Racer and the BX units, who used their powerful sensors to lead us along like rows of ducklings. Still, despite all of that, we made relatively good progress across the wind-swept, toxic wastes.
We also made sure to keep our guard up, as I was worried about what sort of creatures might live on a planet that hellish. The sensors might have said it was empty, but I wasn't taking any chances. Thankfully, we never ran into anything.
After about eight hours of hiking across the very dead planet, following my Clairvoyance the whole time, we were finally getting close to our target. We slowed down considerably and went quiet, going no comms and engaging our suits in low-power mode. It made things a bit less comfortable, and communication through only hand signs or the contact comms on our hands and shoulders was a pain, but we would be almost impossible to detect from a distance.
As we got closer, the land around us began to rise, an incline that continued on a curve upward. It quickly became clear that our target was inside a caldera, and apparently one of the larger ones too. Twice during our hike across the wastes, we were forced to circumnavigate smaller calderas, but they were nothing compared to this.
When we finally reached the top, a rather large struggle with Racer tagging along, we all peaked over the edge, taking in the view. The massive dead volcano was almost certainly more than a mile wide, with steep, treacherous walls that looked ready to cause avalanches at the drop of a hat. The pit itself was actually not that deep, comparatively, with a relatively shallow area, maybe a hundred or hundred and fifty meters down at the deepest. At the general middle was a slight mound of stone and dirt, like a miniature mountain inside of a hole.
I had vague memories from middle school science classes that told me that that was the cap to more recent volcanic activity, but considering we had yet to see a single active volcano on the entire planet, I doubted that was something we needed to worry about.
What we did need to worry about, however, was what had slammed into and around that cap. While the caldera was impressive, the real focus of everyone's attention was the four large starships that lay crashed inside the crater. The opposite caldera wall had been blasted apart from a massive impact, clearly having been slammed into by the ships, with one of them still lying on it, bent around the shattered pile of rock. The largest of the four was more or less at the center of the shallow, its pronged front smashed around the central cap, the miniature mountain that had once been a new volcano.
All of the ships were in rough shape, but I could still identify all of them.
"Holy shit… that explains why no one knew anything was here," I muttered, using a pair of binocs to examine the wreckages.
"What kind of ships are those?" Tatnia asked, her hands on my shoulder. "It looks like three and one… but they look too old, and the scale is off."
"That's because these are what those ships are based off of," I explained, shaking my head. "That one in the middle is a, and the other ships are classic. The pirates are living in wreckage that's about four thousand years old. These are ships from the Ancient Sith War."
"I should be shocked that you can identify a four-thousand-year-old ship on sight, but I'm not," Tatnia said while I waved Ahsoka and Corvak over, both of them linking up to my physical comms.
"I assume the pirates are inside those ships?" Corvak asked.
"Yeah, Clairvoyance leads right to the big one," I responded, giving Ahsoka a look. "How do you feel? Anything off? And bad vibes?"
"No, nothing stands out," Ahsoka responded, tilting her head slightly. "Why?"
"Do me a favor and pick a flat spot to meditate on. Really give it a good feel," I responded before I pointed over the lip to the center ship. "That right there is a Sith ship, around four thousand years old. From back when the Sith were an empire and at war with the Old Republic."
"Holy hell… how did a bunch of pirates stumble into this?" Ahsoka asked, borrowing one of my curses. "Out of any planet they could have gone to..."
"Broken clocks are right twice a day," I pointed out before shaking my head. "And that's just assuming it random. Something could have led them here."
"You mean like something dark?" Ahsoka asked, the tension in her voice rising considerably. "You think there is something dark enough on board that ship to do something like that?"
"Well, this ship comes from the heyday of the Sith, back when there were thousands of them, all training together, doing horrific things with the Force," I pointed out. "The rule of two wasn't a thing, so there were dozens of uber-powerful Sith lords, all potentially just as fucked up as Palpy. Maybe this ship didn't have any Force users on board, so there's nothing to worry about. Or, there could be a Sith Force spirit hanging around, corrupting the pirates and trying to start a new Sith Empire."
"That's… just how likely is that?" Corvak asked, managing to keep his voice surprisingly smooth.
I turned to look at the Mandalorian clan leader before gesturing to myself, then to my crew, and then to the crashed sight sitting in the caldera. By the time I was done, he had gotten the point.
"Right. For anyone else, pretty unlikely, but for us, better safe than sorry," he said, shaking his head. "What do we do if there is something inside?"
"Then we call for backup and head in," I explained with a deceptively casual shrug. "If we can't destroy whatever it is, then we run and flatten it all from orbit. I don't care what sort of payout we miss out on. I'm not letting some ancient spirit out onto the galaxy to wreak havoc. Ahsoka, if you would?"
She nodded and pulled away, finding a flat rock to sit on, crossing her legs and lowering her head slightly. The rest of us sat there and waited, stepping back from the ledge and back into cover, letting Ahsoka reach out with the Force.
For around three minutes, we sat and waited, periodically watching the Harrower to make sure we weren't missing anyone leaving. Finally, Ahsoka stood, stretching slightly before putting her hand on my shoulder.
"I can't feel anything specific, but the pirates themselves are putting off enough energy that they might be hiding something," She admitted. "I think we are good to go, though."
"Well, that means it's probably not some dangerous Sith lord," I said, running my hand over my helmet. "Alright, if the ship doesn't have anything that dark, then it's time to talk planning. Does anyone have any thoughts?"
