17
APPROACHING THE ADEGA SYSTEM
ALSO KNOWN AS THE “LOST SYSTEM”
ABOARD THE DATHOMIRIAN CURSE
It became clear to Ageless that the stories of a supernova or superweapon were true. The Adega system was before him, with wild energy readings and bizarre matter strewn about like an angry child’s destroyed toy. A single tiny rock planet, utterly barren with only mild volcanic activity, floated into view, along with its single lonely moon. Beyond that planet and moon was a scattered, semi-transparent cloud of gases and trillions upon trillions of tiny metal particulates, forming a white cloud that his sensors described as fast-moving and merging with what appeared to be the gaseous remains of an exploded gas giant. This combination of elements was spurred by some unknown anomaly creating invisible, cyclonic storms of inflamed solar radiation. To fly through them would be to risk frying every electrical circuit aboard his ship.
Ageless checked his trouble-board. The Dathomirian Curse had taken a beating over Dagobah, but she was holding, in part due to R4’s ministrations.
He ran through a short breathing exercise Master Yoda had taught him, stretching out with his feelings, trying to sense for an ambush or a trap of any kind. He sensed nothing as yet.
Ahead and to his starboard, the Lady of Hope Ascendant cruised in silence. So far neither Namyr nor Kevv had commed over to him. Radio silence was warranted right now. They had come out of hyperspace at the edge of the system, and immediately received warning from all passive sensors about difficult cosmic terrain, as well as more signs of braking radiation.
Braking radiation was the usual telltale sign that a ship had either entered or exited hyperspace recently. But it was an inexact trail, never as easy as, say, following footprints in mud. You couldn’t follow braking radiation directly to its source, but, if it was strong enough, you may well get a general direction of where the starship went. Currently, all sensors pointed in one direction: in-system, towards where the orbit of Ossus was expected to be, but that was about it.
“Nothing so far on sensors,” Ageless said to R-3PO beside him. “Well, nothing to indicate we’re being targeted, anyway.”
The protocol droid said, “It is very quiet, sir.”
Ageless looked at the dead planet in front of them, then at the immense particle cloud beyond it. “It’s going to take some time navigating around that. Don’t want it to fry our circuits. Do a tightbeam transmission over to the Ascendant, make sure Kevv and Namyr know how dangerous that cloud is. They probably already know, but just in case…”
“Yes, sir.”
While the droid did that, Ageless looked out at the view beyond his window. So, this is Ossus. The lost system. The Jedi abandoned this place thousands of years ago when the Sith invaded. That’s what the histories say, anyway. I wonder if any of them got left behind. What will their descendants look like? What did they leave on Ossus? Anything worth looking into?
During the long journey here, Ageless had perused some of the few remaining histories available on his datapad that concerned Ossus. Being this far outside the galaxy’s proper hyperlanes, though, meant having no connection to the HoloNet. That meant no access to any university research or articles written about Ossus, and also that they were utterly on their own out here, even more so than he’d been on Dagobah.
May as well be adrift on some ocean world, no one looking for our lost ship, sailing into unknown waters.
“Namyr confirms her sensors show the same danger,” R-3PO reported. “She asks to link up the Ascendant’s navicomputer with ours, so that they can confer and look for a safe way around.”
He nodded. “Begin handshake protocols. I’ll have the Curse send out an invite.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
ABOARD THE LADY OF HOPE ASCENDANT
Hours later, Namyr reviewed her scopes as they were coming through the last of the strange debris field. Massive storms of energy were traveling throughout this part of the solar system, most of it invisible to the naked eye. She said over comms, “Sublight jump, moving in-system on my mark.”
“Affirmative,” Ageless’s voice came back. “I’ve received your coordinate grouping and I have it locked in. Awaiting your signal.”
“See anything?” said Kevv.
Namyr glanced over to the twin cockpit. The Duros’s big red eyes were alert, gazing out the viewport with a grim face. “Nothing on scopes,” she said. “You?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Okay, then. Here we go.” She sent a signal over to the Dathomirian Curse, and the two ships slipped almost simultaneously into sublight speed. The stars temporarily became a grouping of white lines before dissolving, and here came an orange-and-black ball. Ossus came rushing at them. They were facing its terminator line, half the planet was in daylight from their vantage, partially occluded by the single gray moon. They moved slowly towards the nightside, so far seeing no sign of ships, Imperial or otherwise. No visual signs, at least.
“Kevv?”
“No contacts, scopes are clear,” he said softly.
For a moment they listened only to the hum of the ship’s air-scrubbers. At present, Ossus was a small half-sphere, about the size of a coin held at arm’s length, but it was quickly growing in size.
Suddenly, Kevv said, “I’ve got something. Braking radiation detected coming over the north and south poles, also tiny blips of ionic displacement conducive with small engine exhaust.” He looked over at Namyr in her cockpit. “You know what that means.”
She did. TIE fighters, she thought. Probably a patrol orbiting the planet’s upper and lower atmosphere. The braking radiation means they’ve got at least one capital ship with them, probably hiding on the far side of the planet. “Let’s go cold for a minute, hopefully remain off their scopes. Signal Ageless so he does the same.”
“On it.”
“I’ll put us on a parabola towards the moon. Hopefully we’ll be concealed there.”
“Hopefully,” Kevv muttered.
As Ossus grew to the size of a dinner plate, Namyr guided the Ascendant gently towards the dark side of the single moon, and immediately they were cast into shadow. The Curse was right behind them. Namyr did only a passive sensor scan, and found no radio or subspace waves emanating from the moon’s surface. Infrared-imaging developed a topographical map, revealing a tortured landscape riddled with massive asteroid impacts, all of them likely ancient.
Then, something picked up on neutron-imaging scopes. “Heads up,” she said. “Ruins.”
“Ruins?” said Kevv.
“Yes, lots of them. Mostly looks like stonework. Most of it is scattered across the surface but radar is showing old roads buried beneath layers of regolith.” Namyr looked at the red-orange lines of buried roadways, most of it circular, like kilometers-long roundabouts, expanding outward in massive concentric rings. “I’m not getting any signs of Imperial archaeologists here.” Namyr tapped her chin, thinking. Commander Fera primarily wanted a sneak-and-peak. But, she would eventually request sabotage of any Imperial efforts if it could be safely done.
But mainly she would want us to confirm that the Hutts’ star route was accurate. Maybe we ought to turn back now. Maybe—
“If you want to head down to Ossus, now’s the time,” Ageless’s voice cut in.
Namyr was shaken from her reverie. “How’s that?”
“On our way in I did a brief deep-field scan—I know, I know, hate me later, but I doubt they’ve got much hardware aimed out-system to pick it up. For now, at least, they believe the Rebel Alliance is either oblivious or too undermanned to fully exploit Ossus. Anyway, my deep-field scan showed next to zero ionic displacement past the moon-planet system.”
“Near to zero isn’t zero,” Namyr pointed out.
Ageless’s voice sounded humored, like he’d heard a good joke. “No, it isn’t. But I can tell you that, from experience, it means that they’re undermanned here, too. If they weren’t, they’d have an Interdictor parked farther out-system to trap incoming spies and eavesdroppers. And remember how little braking radiation we picked up on the way here? This is an advance team, they don’t yet have anything worth calling in a full excavation team like they did on Yavin after the Death Star blew up.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Namyr didn’t need to ask what he meant. After the Battle of Yavin, the Rebels were forced to flee quickly because they’d known the Empire would swoop in quickly, seeking retribution on those that had destroyed their brand-new toy. The Alliance’s award ceremony for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo had been hurried, it was the last duty done before large-scale evacuation measures were ordered. The rumor was that when the Empire arrived to find a vacant world, they’d brought in huge Excavator-class ships to begin digging beneath the stone temple the Rebels had used as a base. Rebel spies who looked in on the operation picked up comms chatter between two Moffs on site, and discovered it was all part of Emperor Palpatine’s interest in Jedi and Sith artifacts.
It turned out, the Great Massassi Temple, as it was known, was once the hideout of a Dark Lord of the Sith named Naga Sadow. That had been 5,000 years ago during the Great Hyperspace War. The Great Massassi Temple was so large, and extended so far underground, that it was believed it had been built using gravitronic construction—that employed antigrav technology and tractor beams to erect large structures.
This massive archaeological mission at the behest of the Emperor was their first hint of Palpatine’s obsession with finding ancient artifacts of dubious historical import. Namyr had only been a new recruit into the Rebellion when she’d heard of this, and now, being this close to such an operation, it made her wonder at the significance.
“If I had to guess—and I think it’s a pretty good guess—there’s a Gozanti starship here, or maybe a Victory-class, but not both,” Ageless was saying.
“How can you be so sure?” Namyr said, rechecking sensors constantly to make sure they hadn’t been spotted.
“If there’s some other massive construction effort going on at Endor, like you said, then a lot of Imperial fleets will be drawn there to protect it. And I happen to know that the Empire is already spread very thin. You Rebs have done a damn good job harrying them these last two years, making them feel like they have to put out wildfires in every part of the galaxy. They wouldn’t spare more than a single cruiser out here.”
Them, Namyr thought. He referred to the Empire as “them,” not “us.” It was a small distinction, but an important one. Whether it was conscious or not, she couldn’t say for sure…and yet she felt positive that Ageless Void was neither Imperial nor Rebel, neither for nor against anything going on politically in the galaxy right now. Yet he was drawn here to Ossus. She’d seen his interest, as well as his eagerness to come along on the journey.
There’s something down there, and it’s calling to him.
She didn’t know just how right she was.
“If you sync your sensors to mine, and slave your controls to me, I think I can lead you guys through any patrols,” he said. “All the way down to the surface.”
“And how will you do that?” Namyr asked.
“Skipping.”
“Come again?”
“Atmospheric skipping. It’s a trick of approaching a planet on a parabola, then diving hard towards the planet. You send your ship into a random, uncontrolled tumble, and then you run cold, shutting off all life-support, all engines, all systems, everything.”
Kevv chimed in. “I know what he’s talking about, Namyr. I’ve done it before. Basically asteroids tumble through space, they don’t remain straight and plane-keeping as starships do, so you set your ship to imitate the way an asteroid tumbles. But with all systems off, it can really, really hurt both you and your ship, because it means artificial gravity is switched off, too. So we may pull some heavy g’s on the way down.”
“And then there’s the turbulence once you hit atmo,” Ageless said. “Without deflector shields, our ships will get very hot, very fast, becoming fireballs. But that’s when we switch all systems back online and make our final approach.”
“Could cause serious hull damage,” Kevv put in.
“It could,” Ageless agreed. “And the overheating could melt some internal circuits. Make sure you have a vac-suit and an escape pod ready to go.”
This all sounded highly dangerous to Namyr. “Does this technique actually work?”
Kevv said, “Me and my old squadron had to do it a couple of times to get past planetary patrols and land somewhere on the equator.” He shrugged. “And that’s where you want to do it, the equator, because that’s the fattest part of any planet, and whatever TIEs are in low or high orbit will have a long distance to travel if they’re homing in on you.”
“The idea,” Ageless said, “is to set in a course before you make your approach, using the navicomputer to do some serious orbital dynamics calculations in advance. Arfour is good with that kind of thing, he can do it.”
“He certainly can!” R-3PO chimed in abruptly. “Arfour is extremely gifted in—”
“Anyways, we essentially look like a couple of asteroids making a random tumble towards the planet. It’s a good trick that usually gets past most sensor sweeps. But, like I said, it carries some risk with it. I think we can do it. By the time any TIEs get there we’ll have already broken through atmo, switched our engines back on, and landed safely in some mountainous stretch on Ossus, preferably on the nightside.”
Namyr’s fingers tapped her flight controls. She looked down at the ruins showing up on the moon. If the ancient Jedi built such a civilization here on the moon, she thought, then what other awesome works might they have built down on the planet, with proper atmosphere? She considered all points. Part of her wanted to leave immediately and return to Commander Fera with all that they had learned.
But if they left now, the Empire could be done excavating some ancient Sith superweapon that was left buried here ages ago. They could retrieve it and be gone long before any Rebel teams arrived to sabotage the operation. If the Jedi were killed here by a Sith superweapon, and there was even the smallest chance that pieces of it had been left here intact, and that the Empire’s scientists could somehow reverse-engineer it…
She thought about how fast the Death Star had been built, and how it had been done in secret.
“All right,” she said finally, sighing and flipping switches to begin slaving the Ascendant to the Curse’s controls. “If we’re going to do this, then there’s no sense in arguing over the whether-tos and the why-fors. Ageless, you’d better be right about this.”
“Kevv,” Ageless said, “after Arfour has the approach vector worked out, I want you to check his math. Not that I don’t trust the little guy, but a second set of eyes never hurt.”
“Affirmative. Can do.”
* * *
The skipping maneuver began flawlessly. Both ships were put on an approach vector, taking into account the gravitational push and pull between Ossus and its moon, and came around on a wide parabola. When both ships had cleared the moon, Ageless Void commanded both ships’ engines to flare for exactly 32.127 seconds—the exact amount calculated by R4—and then put themselves into random rolls and spins. They spun on every axis, tumbling chaotically while the passengers inside the Curse and the Ascendant remained strapped in, dealing with heavy g-forces for the next several minutes.
They killed all power to both their ships.
They clung to their armrests.
They were now helpless, completely blind, giving very little heat. All organic passengers were inside their vac-suits, keeping their ships’ life-support systems shut off. They would have no way of knowing if they were being targeted, no warnings whatsoever.
But Ageless Void was confident in this tactic, and he was even more confident in Kevv’s support of R4’s math. This was going to work. He could feel it. Something in the Force fed him this certainty, that this was the best possible approach, and as he stretched out with his feelings to get a sense of any malevolent forces that might currently be targeting them, he sensed nothing. He was sure they were going to make it.
What he didn’t know—what he couldn’t have known—was that seven Imperial probe droids had been left in cold, equidistant orbit high above the moon’s surface, and set only to activate once their passive sensors detected heat blooms or ionic exhaust. Which they did, just before the Curse and the Ascendant went cold. But the skipping maneuver accounted for this type of thing—mostly—and so the probe droids were unable to get a clean reading.
However, the probe droids did make note of both ships’ profiles a few seconds before they disappeared around Ossus’s nightside, and they were able to collaborate, piecing together fragments each of them had found in neutron-imaging. They confirmed that one ship was a YT model, probably 2400, and that the other was a strange, not-yet-released-to-the-public type of starship, a twin-cockpit SoroSuub Kilaktu-4000, a five-passenger ship in the shape of a crescent moon.
The probe droids relayed this to a trio of TIE Defenders, who just happened to be heading towards the moon to check in with a small listening base they’d set up on the surface, along with a handful of security droids who could survive on the airless moon. When they received this strange reading from the probes, the TIE pilots almost dismissed it, thinking it likely to be a small glitch in one of the probe droids’ sensors. Nothing to worry about, happens all the time.
But the TIE squadron commander happened to be none other than designee DS-61-4, a pilot of no mean skill who only went by his last name: Cazrael. “Killer Caz” was how he was known among the TIE fighter elite. He had trained under the legendary “Mauler” Mithel, who had died as he flew alongside Darth Vader at the Battle of Yavin. Cazrael was an Ace of Aces, having shot down more than thirty Rebel starfighters in his time, surviving with hardly a scratch, and performing bombing runs on a dozen different worlds.
Cazrael had seen it all: Rebels dressing A-wings to look like cargo vessels, Rebel spies hiding inside shipping containers and asteroids, and flung down towards a planet’s surface to slip past Imperial patrols, and Rebel pilots abandoning their starfighters using their ejection seats, and then flying around in jetpacks to try and fling their bodies through TIE fighter cockpits.
“Caz,” his mentor Mithel had once said to him, “you cannot underestimate the Rebel mind. They are devious. Worse than that, they’re desperate, demented, and fanatical. A more dangerous combination doesn’t exist outside of a black hole. Trust me, I know. And you can’t put anything past them. Not a damn thing. Remember that.”
So, when “Killer Caz” saw the neutron-imaging scans, he wasn’t fooled. He knew. He just knew.
He signaled his two wingmen and they continued on their current mission, but Caz put in a request with Moff Inrammen, who was currently aboard the Gozanti-class ship Emperor’s Might, hovering above Ossus’s dayside, and who Cazrael had long served as honor-guard pilot. Cazrael’s request was to go and inspect the unknown anomalies, which his gut told him was somehow Rebel-connected.
Moff Inrammen returned a curt message: Cazrael had his permission to investigate, just as soon as he and his squadron were finished checking in with the scanning station on the moon.
Cazrael sent back an acknowledgement. Then, unbeknownst to him, Moff Inrammen sent a message to one of seven subspace transceivers that he’d had his intelligence officers secretly insert throughout the Hutt Route. These transceivers, peppered randomly throughout the long, tortured route, allowed short bursts of communiqués back to the Emperor’s Cunning, an Arquitens-class starship waiting back on the Perlemian Trade route to hear back from them. Moff Inrammen reported the sighting to the Cunning’s commander, who then disseminated it to other Imperial craft in the sector.
That short communiqué, reporting the possible existence of only a pair of unknown craft around Ossus, reached all the way to Imperial Security Bureau sector chiefs, who included it in an addendum to a report that was handed daily to Emperor Palpatine himself, who would see it as merely a hiccup in a slew of updates, for his focus would be squarely on Endor, and a plan he had evolving there.
But the communiqué would catch the eye of a handful of people in the IIS. Handlers for certain Kingdom assets would catch hold of it, and relay it to the Voice of Ether when he exited hyperspace close to Dagobah, the last known location of Ageless Void. And the description of the YT-2400 in connection to a SoroSuub Kilaktu-4000—an extremely rare ship that Unsheathed Saber reported had chased him away from the Dagobah system—would immediately jump out at him.
But Cazrael was unaware of all of this, he was only fixated on the fact that he might actually get to see a little action way out here in the pit of nowhere. He was tired of patrolling empty space and inspecting random rocks, and was confident that very soon, he would have another couple of tally marks to scrawl on the side of his Defender.