That was my second spaceship crash in... two days?
Raey recovered his senses to that thought, and it made him simultaneously annoyed and a little impressed in himself.
"I really should be dead right now," he said, or tried to say. His throat felt like sand and his... everything hurt. Especially his left arm and side – those really hurt. The air felt strange, hot but somehow heavy. He opened his eyes and hoped he would see some good news.
He was lying in the shuttle. So far, so good. The cockpit was sideways. So far, not bad. There were huge, thick branches sticking in through the front window, which itself was fogged over. Honestly, I'm alright with that. LN was lying, unconscious or worse, on the wall nearby, blood running off her face onto the metal from a dark, ugly wound on the side of her head. Nope, no, not good.
Raey tried to push himself to his feet and stifled a scream. His left arm... broken, but thankfully not poking through the skin. Maybe some ribs broken, too, or at least cracked, but they definitely hurt like death. He bit his lip and carefully got into a sitting position, then looked around the cockpit for something he could use to...
He realized he didn't know what he planned on doing, even if he could find something useful. He noticed the dismantled parts of the tracker, lying scattered near the base of the wall-that-was-now-a-slanted-floor. The stun baton lay by the inner wall. LN's blaster was gone.
Raey took a deep breath, trying to steady his thoughts and nerves, then rolled onto his good arm and began awkwardly crawling towards the stun baton, pushing tracker parts and wires with him as he went. His thought had been to use the baton for a splint, but once he reached it he realized he needed more then a single metal rod for that. He had been forced to take care of his own injuries before (climbing around Star Destroyers resulted in more then a few broken bones until you got the hang of it), but he had access to emergency supplies in those situations.
"Where am I going to find rods for a splint in the middle of some crazy plant world..."
His complaint trailed off. Raey looked at the big branch sticking into their cockpit, and all the smaller branches that stuck out all over it, and felt very foolish for a brief moment. Then he got over it.
He steeled himself again and made his slow, agonizing way over to the other side of the cockpit. Thank the Force it's such a small ship. Once close enough, he slowly began working at the thickest branch he thought he could reasonably snap off by hand. He had to switch to a smaller one a minute later when the tree proved stronger then anticipated, but Raey excused that away with the convenient fact that he had never seen a tree before, much less tried to break one.
With only one hand available, Raey held the snapped-off branch with his crossed ankles, then broke it into smaller, roughly foot-length pieces with his right hand. Then, using the wires he had torn out of the tracker, he clenched one little extra stick between his teeth and tried desperately not to let out unmanly whimpers as he bound up his broken arm into the makeshift splint.
Thankfully, the one upside to LN being unconscious meant there were no witnesses. Whether or not unmanly whimpers had occurred could not be proven, and would never be spoken of after the deed was done.
Once he had recovered, and investigated his intensely-painful ribs to no avail ("Yep, they hurt, but I don't see any bone sticking out and there is nothing I can do."), he crawled over to LN. Ah! There was her blaster, right under her arm where Raey wouldn't have been able to see it.
"That's good," he declared optimistically. "Now we have a weapon in case some weird plant creatures try to invade our lovely wrecked shuttle."
The forced optimism had worn thin at the end there, but, again, Raey didn't care too much with no one around to judge him. He carefully tilted her head so he could look at the wound and hissed sympathetically through his teeth.
Water to clean it... no, something to wrap it up? This is a very clean shuttle, she shouldn't have to worry too much about an infection, and washing it will just start the bleeding back up. Raey hoped his logic held up. Broken arms and legs, sun burns and heat sickness, those he knew how to deal with. Head wounds were a far more complicated business he had, fortunately and unfortunately, not had to try and fix before.
He made his way, slowly and carefully, back into the hall of the shuttle. There should be something clean in the crew-quarters I can use.
He changed his mind halfway down the narrow hall. LN had pointed out the crew-quarters for him and the room with the exit ramp was pretty self-explanatory, but there were a few other doors he hadn't had time to explore yet. The doors were unpowered, so Raey braced himself in the first strange doorframe he came across and pulled it open with his good arm.
It wasn't easy. The machinery wanted to stick in place, but Raey was desperate. He slowly forced the door open enough to get through, then peeked inside, hoping to see a medbay or a storage room.
Officer's quarters.
He raided it anyway and found another pressed, bagged uniform that, he reasoned, had to be cleaner then most cloth he had encountered in his life. He returned to LN and used the clean shirt as a bandage around her head and then, on impulse, folded the pants and tucked it beneath her head like a pillow. It wasn't much, but it was better then metal. That immediate concern taken care of, Raey went back to pull open the other doors. He was convinced there had to be medical supplies in the shuttle somewhere, and LN needed them.
After prying open the second door, the heat became too much to tolerate. Raey had never felt so easily drained by heat, but there was something about this air that made his skin sticky with sweat and his thoughts sluggish. He pulled off the First Order uniform and found, to his surprise, that it was actually damp.
"That can't be just from sweat..." he mused, then took a more careful look around. The walls had a sheen, like the metal inside the vaporator. With a shock of realization, Raey finally understood what that odd feeling in the air was.
Water. The very air on this planet was filled with water.
Raey trailed a hand down the damp metal and rubbed his fingers against his palm, marveling at the sensation. It was no secret among traders and spacers that there were planets with oceans of water and rain freely falling nearly every day, but it had always been so far away. Listening to them talk in the trading posts of Jakku, the wet-worlds didn't seem fully real.
How can water get all the way into the sky before coming back down?
Why don't people drown when they breathe?
Childish questions, but he had never had anyone to answer them for him. Already, though, he wasn't terribly fond of this wet air. It somehow, against all logic, made the heat seem worse then it had been on Jakku.
The mystery of the damp air held his attention for a minute, but he did not forget the urgency of his mission. He abandoned his now-unneeded uniform and continued rummaging through the ship in his desert clothes, and his thorough investigation finally ended in the storage room.
Medical supplies, emergency rations, water.
"Perfect."
The damp air did nothing to quench his raging thirst ("Another downside, stupid wet planet."), so Raey was glad to see the individual containers of water stacked on top of one another in one crate. He claimed one and began taking small, frequent sips as he collected the other supplies he thought they would need. (He had learned proper water-etiquette before learning to Basic.)
Clean bandages for LN's wound were easy to find, but Raey took several minutes carefully reading labels and sorting through assorted emergency medical boxes, trying to find something he was familiar with, before he finally came across a handful of bacta kits. The instructions seemed simple enough, so he put those in the pile of things to haul back to the cockpit. After that, ration packs, and a couple more bottles of water. Somehow, this hot, wet air had already begun drying out his mouth again, and he just didn't understand how.
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LN was still unconscious when he got back, so Raey just silently got to work. He washed his hands with a bit of their drinking water (it felt like a waste, but he had learned the dangers of infection long ago), and then carefully pulled away the makeshift bandage so he could treat her wound.
"Bacta... bacta..." he muttered, taking the two different containers he had found bearing the name, one in each hand. One suggested direct application to the wound, the other had been designed for drinking. With a shrug, he decided to use both.
He washed the drying blood out of her light hair, though this did, as he had suspected, cause the long gash across the side of her head to start bleeding anew.
"The directions said to wash first," he said apologetically, looking with skepticism at the medicine again. Like wet-worlds, the spacers had mentioned how effective bacta was before, but, again like the wet-worlds, Raey had no idea how accurate those claims were. "No other choice but to try," he admitted, and poured a little of the bluish medicine over the head wound. Then, just to be sure, he soaked one of the bandages in the stuff and used that to cover her injury again.
He figured the drinkable bacta was for internal injuries, so he took a swig first. Then grimaced. Medicine, of course, tasted terrible.
The instructions said to be generous, so he forced another gulp down and then began the difficult job of propping LN up and holding the bottle to her lips with only one good arm. She instinctively swallowed when the liquid hit her throat, and since she was unconscious she didn't have to taste the stuff.
"Now we just have to wait and see if this stuff is really as good as everyone says," Raey declared, shaking around the rest of the direct-application bacta in the bottom of its bottle. On a whim, he poured it down under the wires securing his cast. It itched and tickled, but he didn't want to risk hurting himself further by taking the cast off and redoing it with bandages.
Something slammed into the roof of the shuttle, shaking it in their host tree. Raey grabbed LN with his good hand and braced himself against the tilted center console with his foot, but the shaking soon subsided. It was replaced by a sinister, metallic clicking, the tap tap of something very hard, and rather heavy, hitting their roof in a rhythmic pattern.
Then THUNK.
The shuttle lurched under the impact. Raey glanced at LN's blaster, wondering if he could shoot whatever was attacking their shuttle, but one look out the window was all he needed to abandon that idea. With a broken arm, he couldn't climb out there with a blaster, not without risking a potentially deadly fall. How high up are we? he wondered, his musings restricted to thought for fear of alerting something to their location.
Thunk thunk.
A terrible squawk filled the air, loud and close enough to reverberate through the shuttle's walls. Sand-vulture... Raey realized, then corrected himself. Forest-vulture?
The bird (Raey hoped he was right and it was just a bird) pecked at the roof of the shuttle, each impact cracking against the metal and drawing unnerving creaks from the branches of the tree supporting them. Raey kept very still, but it was too late. With one last crack, this time from the tree itself, something gave way and the shuttle plummeted downward, the movement making Raey's stomach swoop for a brief moment before they all smashed into the ground. Raey let out a pained gasp of breath while, outside, the bird squawked again and fled in a flurry of heavy wings.
"Well, at least we're out of the tree," he said, trying to sound optimistic again. Then he looked over at LN. "Though I don't know why I'm trying. You can't appreciate it right now."
Admitting it made Raey's mood drop as suddenly and dramatically as their shuttle had, plunging through the trees. He sighed and leaned back against the wall, feeling suddenly the same weight, the same pressure to just survive that he had hoped to leave behind on the desert world.
"I guess the galaxy is the same everywhere."
.
LN woke up sweating, aching, and irritated. She kept still and barely opened her eyelids, giving her surroundings a narrow scan and a careful listen before committing to opening them fully.
Her shuttle was in trouble. The crash flashed through her memory suddenly and painfully. She remembered flipping, at least once, and then... nothing. She felt a throbbing in her head and raised her hand, felt the bandage and the dampness.
Blood? No... bacta.
Ah. Raey.
The scavenger was nowhere in the shuttle, but a pile of supplies sat within easy reach next to her, and the control consoles had clearly taken some human damage. Entire panels had been pried away, their wires hanging out for all to see. She almost smiled. Of course. Without her conscious to scare Raey away from them, he probably hadn't been able to keep his curious fingers out of the shuttle systems for more then a few minutes.
She hoped he hadn't been too hasty. The crash had been bad, yes, but the shuttle was still their only way off this world right now.
Her head pounded when she tried to stand, but at least her legs worked. No blaster... Raey had probably taken it.
Perhaps he is patrolling the area.
He had left her the stun baton, which she appreciated. She armed herself, took a long drink of water, then carefully crawled over the console.
The datachip was gone. It would have been protected from the worst of the impact, tucked away inside the console, which meant Raey had it.
Just as well.
When her legs felt steady enough, she steeled herself and climbed over the control panels and out the smashed front window.
Hot, muggy, greenery and vines everywhere... they had crashed in a textbook hostile jungle scenario. The vegetation was so dense LN couldn't see far in any direction, but above the initial tangle of wild, unidentifiable plants rose gnarled, many-trunked trees several hundred feet tall each. They were draped in ivy and covered in wide leaves, but somehow the leaves seemed to catch fairly little light – the sun shone through them brightly enough to light up the forest floor.
The shuttle had broken a path down through the branches, and LN had to squint as she looked up at the sky. This world had a bright sun, and the warmth of it made the jungle miserably humid.
The familiar ring of blaster fire broke the ambient insect sounds of the jungle. LN immediately recognized the sound of her E-12 and it sounded close, so she jumped down off the nose of the shuttle and took off into the jungle.
Something came crashing through the plant-life towards her, something large, and the blaster fire came with it. She ducked behind a large tree trunk and readied her stun baton, hoping Raey hadn't picked a fight with some horrifying jungle monster that wasn't bothered by electricity.
That's probably exactly what he has done, she thought a moment later.
A red laser bolt appeared briefly through the trees a stone's throw to one side of LN's tree, followed quickly by another. Something roared loudly in pain, and LN took the chance. She dashed out of cover and ran for the origin of those blaster bolts, pushing her way through the dense vegetation to get there.
She found Raey standing, panting, in front of a large, vaguely feline creature. From the steaming holes in its fur, LN judged it to be either dead or a very convincing pretender. Raey saw her and smiled crookedly, looking almost as embarrassed as pleased with himself.
"I meant to secure the area," he said brightly, "but this thing had the same idea." He nudged it with his foot. "I really like your blaster, by the way."
LN folded her arms across her chest, deepening her natural stern look into a glower.
"Give it back."
Raey looked at the blaster longingly for a moment, then reluctantly handed it to her. "It's good to see you up and about," he said as she looked her weapon over for damage. "I thought for sure that crash was going to get us both killed, but bacta is... actual sorcery."
"Incorrect, but I wouldn't be surprised if sorcerers had something to do with creating it originally," LN replied absentmindedly, flicking some many-legged jungle insect off the barrel of the E-12. "During your attempt to secure the area, did you find any evidence of sentient life? Paths, structures, footprints?"
"Er... not unless this furry thing was sentient. It seemed to have a kind of nest in the trees, but it tried to eat me, so I'm pretty sure it's not sophisticated enough to be sentient."
"There are plenty of sentient cannibals and alien-eaters, Raey. In this case, however, I happen to agree with you. Let's get back to the shuttle for now. I need to see if we can save it."
Raey's smile vanished. "I already did that," he confirmed. "The damage done by the enemy fighter might have been fixable with some spare parts or, at least, some clever patching, but the crash itself took out our other thruster, smashed in the nose, and put a tree branch through the control systems. I don't think the Shuttle Diomediun will fly again without completely replacing some of her parts."
"Her?" LN narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "Have you managed to become attached to the shuttle already?"
"She's a good ship!" Raey protested. "I just lost my other ship that I worked on for five years, the Diomediun got me out of captivity, and we wouldn't have crashed at all if it hadn't been for that black fighter, so, yeah, I feel bad about not being able to save her."
LN was reminded suddenly and intensely of RK-3297. He had been their squad's dedicated pilot, and he had loved his ships with a passion LN had never been able to understand. She shook her head to force the comparison out of her head, turning away. "In that case, then we should abandon the wreck. There will be no rescue coming, so staying put will only put us in the crosshairs of anything that took note of the crash."
"And then?" asked Raey, jogging to catch up with her brisk walk. LN didn't have an answer for him.
.
They left the shuttle less then an hour later, weighed down by supplies. LN led the way, once again wearing her white armor, her blaster at the ready, while Raey followed along behind with the stun baton at his belt and nothing but food, water, and medical supplies on his back. LN had absolutely refused to let him bring parts from the shuttle, but tucked here and there, in the pockets and folds of his robe, several choice pieces of salvage had made it past her distracted eye. Both had consumed and applied as much bacta as they dared from the ship's remaining supply before leaving, but it was with definite regret that Raey watched the Diomediun vanish into the underbrush behind them. In the back of his mind, he knew this might be the only wreck he would ever have the first pick over, and yet he was forced to walk away.
"Good bye, beautiful ship," he murmured, and turned back to follow LN into the jungle.