Ask Things Which Should Not Be

[Eirik Sunwielder]

Somewhere, Rolion Sector​

Distress.

Distress calls had a way of putting someone on edge. It was uncommon for there to be emergency calls sent out in this region of space, rarer still for there to be no further word from the sending party. Killiks had supposedly attacked the Haughty Platter, an EF-70 Nebulon bulk freighter, but there had been nothing else transmitted from the vessel aside from its initial distress call. It was not normal and that warranted a heavier response from the Jedi as a result. Three Jedi had been sent to investigate the matter and hopefully bring order to chaos. What, exactly, the problem that needed to be solved was had yet to be determined. He could see the freighter and its aggressor locked together in a muted void-dance, so why was nobody answering the hails?

With a gentle tilt of his control stick, Eirik brought the Sunfang on an approach vector with the Platter. Once again, he opened a comms frequency with the freighter in the hopes of getting anything. ”Haughty Platter, this is the Sunfang of the Jedi Order,” he grumbled out, ”Does anyone read me?” There was a pause after he transmitted, then nothing but unnerving static and silence. Brows furrowed in frustrated thought, Eirik switched to a private frequency with the other Jedi of his response party as his ship glided silently through the void alongside the freighter.

”This is Sunwielder,” he said, bringing his ship in to prepare for docking procedures with the bulk freighter, ”No response from the Platter. Never heard of a total communications blackout on one of these things. You'd think with a thousand people on board, someone would pick up the phone.” It was the most unsettling part of the entire ordeal; an entire bulk freighter, capable of housing anywhere from a few hundred to over two thousand personnel, and not a single response from anyone onboard. With the killik ship nearby and utterly unmoving, the sinking feeling in his gut only sank lower.

His astromech began finalizing the calculations for a smooth docking procedure while he focused on bringing the ’Fang in smoothly. His wary eyes panned over the hull of the ship as he brought her in, searching for any signs of damage or battle, but finding none. Instead, he was met with the cold indifference of untouched quadanium. Everything about this operation seemed to put him on edge and he knew it was only going to get worse once they were inside.

He heaved a sigh as his ship made contact with the freighter and rose from the pilot’s seat, taking one last look out of the viewport at the drifting metal coffin ahead.

@Jake @Wit

 

[Hieronymus Crane]

Hieronymus had been nursing one of those visceral bad feelings in his gut since before the last hyperspace jump to the Carpastor system, a quiet little corner of the Rolion sector. Hieronymus had never been down this particular branch of the Hydian Way, but felt that the region was entirely too close to the Tionese Cluster he used to call home. The Order had specifically requested him for this mission, owing to the scarcity of Jedi with his background in xenobiology.

That bad feeling matured into more of a this is going to be really kriffing grim feeling shortly after his arrival, when every attempt to hail the Haughty Platter met with complete silence.

Hieronymus had only bothered to try for an hour. Then, sighing, he'd realized he was going to be here for awhile and resolved to wait for his fellow Jedi to arrive in-system.

Nearly two standard days had passed since then. Hieronymus sat now in his meditation chamber on board the Desevran Songbird, staring intently at the feed being patched to him from the bridge: the bulk freighter entangled with the Killik vessel, a sleek, insectile ship that hovered menacingly above its prey, unsettlingly like a wasp poised over a cockroach.

Dark circles haloed his eyes. He had the look of a troubled man, toking a cigarra continually, face pale in the bluish glow of HoloNet feeds orbiting him at varying distance.

Some showed news feeds related to the Killik Crisis. Others were papers from cutting edge scientific journals: genomic sequencing data comparing endocrinological profiles of every species in the known galaxy in search of something homologous to the hypothetical Killik Joining pheromone; anatomical comparisons of Joiners and non-Joiners of the same species and the evident alterations to the corpus callosum.

Hieronymus did not share the one Sith scientist's optimistic perspective on a cure for the Joined. These were fundamental changes in the wetware, a process that seemed to rewire the gray matter and turn a person into something like a living HoloNet port except the network was a Killik hivemind. Hieronymus couldn't even imagine how you could go about undoing a change like that, much less what kind of identity could be retained in the process.

This was all, in other words, some seriously terrifying shit. Rakghoul plague level nightmare fuel. Top it off with rumors that the Haughty Platter was Outer Rim-bound with AMS victims on board and you had yourself a satisfyingly abominable pile of poodoo and Hieronymus, of course, was up to his neck in it. On the bright side, scraping the darkweb had turned up one delightful bit of new jargon -- people were calling the Joiners bugsluts now.

This factoid filled him with glee. Bugsluts.

His astromech patched Sunwielder's communique through to him and he absentmindedly swatted a few HoloNet feeds away. Others he quickly forwarded to the other Jedi in case the information could be of use to them. Before he spoke, he also indicated to his astromech to finalize their approach vector calculations and prepare to board the freighter.

Then he relayed over their shared frequency, "Received, Sunwielder. This is Crane. I'll start bringing my Songbird in for boarding. We need to treat this with full AMS containment protocol, so prepare yourselves accordingly. Whatever these Killiks are doing to people, we have to consider that it might also spread by some kind of airborne biological agent." Hieronymus sighed and turned away from his comm as he prepared to gear up, keying a few screens. Retractable loadout racks recessed into the walls of the chamber extended outward.

One of the bad things about being a Jedi was that when you got the this is going to be really kriffing grim feeling in your gut, you were usually right.

@Wit @Painus

 

[Tahiri]

A beep went off somewhere near Tahiri's ear, and as she slowly pulled out of the hibernation trance she had tried to slip into for the duration of the hyperspace jump, she started to notice that it was a persistent beep that refused to stop. It took her a moment or two to orient herself, and before she could catch up she tried to stretch out on instinct, immediately banging a knee against the control panel of the tiny cockpit she was currently in. Despite wearing a full evac suit under her robes, the impact was hard enough to hurt, and only added to the irritation she felt at the beeping that still hadn't stopped.

Things only got worse as one of the Knights started speaking on the comms, and Tahiri's silver lining in the cloud of chaos that was the tiny cockpit of the old X-wing she had been assigned for this mission was the fact that she had had the foresight to leave her comms on mute. It meant that the wave of insults that had escaped her lips did not reach either Knight's ears. It was tricky enough to try and find a way to massage her knee while taking control of the ship from the R4 droid that was beeping away from the astromech's slot, trying to keep a civil tongue was not an added responsibility she wanted right then.

"Tzatziki....inbound." She stared at her control panel, lost on when, or who had changed her callsign. Having some idea of who it might be, she made a mental note to get Maura in trouble with the Grandmaster somehow, have her run another hundred laps around the temple or something. She took the ship in about as smoothly as she could, and landed besides the other ships. After running a quick diagnostic to make sure there was atmosphere in the hangar, she popped the cockpit hatch and stretching out her hands as she stood up in her seat. Almost ten hours stuck in that tiny cockpit, that had not been fun.

She jumped out of the cockpit, and landed on the hangar floor, noticing something she had missed while doing her stretches. There were no ships in the hangar, other than the three ships the Jedi had arrived in. There ought to have been a shuttle or two, she was sure there was even a small scout ship listed somewhere in the mission's log.

"Is this hangar supposed to be so empty?" She asked as the two Knights emerged from their ships.

@Painus @Jake

 

[Eirik Sunwielder]

Khhh. Khhh.

His chest rose and fell in rhythm with the noises his rebreather amplified. Eirik hated wearing this thing; his beard made it scratchy and uncomfortable with how tight of a fit it was, but he knew the necessity of it. AMS plagued the galaxy for years, and with what he’s read and seen, he wanted nothing to do with that. He quite enjoyed being himself. With a muted whirr, the storage racks in his ship receded back into position, concealing their contents within.

Silently, Eirik tromped off his ship. Dull footfalls echoed against the metal in the vast emptiness of the hangar, and this, too, clued Eirik in to something being amiss. Suddenly, his idle unease shifted to cautious paranoia. Venom-green eyes peered out beneath furrowed brow, panning around the hangar, scanning for signs of life and finding none. It was like being on a ship in drydock. Crewless, exposed, skeletal. It unnerved him to have expected hundreds of passengers and crew only to be met with none.

Distantly, the lighting buzzed noiselessly and flickered without pattern, though the lights around them remained unaffected. Eirik learned early on to trust his instinct, and everything about this operation screamed at him to not engage with it. In spite of his internal protests, this was his duty, and he would not find himself wanting. He lofted a hand in greeting to the others and beckoned them over.

”You’re right,” he grumbled through his mask, ”It’s too quiet.” He gave the hangar another look around before abruptly shouting, ”Where is the crew?!” His voice reverberated around the hangar before distance jealously snatched it away and settled back to eerie silence. There was no answer, and the lights only flickered ever onward. It irritated him.

”We’ll find the bridge. Their communications could be jammed,” he rationalized before pressing on towards the nearest door. He wasn’t overly familiar with this ship’s layout, but he was sure that going somewhere was far better than staying put.

A few tip-taps of gloved hand against door keypad unsealed the door with a mechanical hiss, opening the way to a long, narrow corridor that branched off at various points like they were in some grand vascular system in this skeletal beast of a ship. Sterile, gunmetal-grey bulkheads joined with an equally austere deck that reflected the pale lighting above. Once again, there were no signs of passage through the hall any time recently, at least not at a glance. Eirik could smell something on the air that didn’t sit right with him, and he knew his companions would probably feel similarly uneasy.

He could’ve sworn he heard the distant chitter of something insectile, but when he paused to listen, he heard only the oppressive silence and his quiet breathing. A shake of his head dismissed the notion and he pressed on into the hall.

Thmp, thmp, thmp, his boots sounded plainly against the deck with each step, making no attempt to muffle his approach. He walked on and on until something in his periphery warned him to halt.

There, diminutive compared to the scale of the starship, splattered against where deck met bulkhead, was a small scattering of crimson droplets. Eirik raised a hand to signal his comrades to cease, and then pointed at it, letting his finger trace along them from a distance. He looked ahead and noticed, with incongruency in their spacing, additional spatterings of blood, guiding them further into the ship.

He wasn’t sure his brows could furrow any further.

@Wit @Jake

 

[Hieronymus Crane]

Hieronymus inhaled for a long while on his cigarette before he smashed it into the ashtray in his quarters, savoring it. You never knew which one would be the last. He double checked that he had the appropriate gear and extra oxygen sacs for his rebreather as he settled a standalone enviro-suit helmet onto his head, taking a few deep breaths to acclimate himself to the device.

"Bain," he said to the astromech hovering beside him to the gentle thrum of its repulsorlift. His voice had a strange, staticky bark to it through the enviro-helm's intercom. "Monitor the Killik vessel and keep the ship ready for emergency evac. Run what diagnostics you can on the Haughty Platter and forward them to me, but nothing that'll attract attention to the Songbird." When his droid beebooped disapprovingly, ever a vicious little nerd, the Jedi added, "I mean it, 1N. Not so much as an elevated thermal signature. This place gives me the creeps."

It had been awhile since he last spoke to Eirik - they were Padawans together back on Yavin IV. He knew the gruff Jedi as a dependable, stubborn lug of a man, and pretty much the polar opposite of Hieronymus himself. He wondered how the years had changed Jedi Knight Sunwielder. His other companion was totally unknown to him. But had he heard her identify herself correctly?

Tzatziki? Seriously?

A few minutes later he was outside and in the hangar with the other Jedi. He exchanged a quick greeting with Eirik and introduced himself to Tahiri while they started towards a hallway deeper into the freighter. Catching his reflection on one of their ships as he passed, Hieronymus noticed that he looked like a two-bit villain from a holodrama, wearing just a helmet on top of his usual attire.

Following close behind Eirik and Tahiri, he winced inwardly when Eirik shouted, deciding that the years had probably not changed him much at all. While his companion opened the door, Hieronymus forwarded them a few HoloNet articles he'd been reading regarding the Killiks.

"Not sure if you guys have had time to read up on the Killiks, so I'll keep it short." He shot a glance over his shoulder before he went on. Had he imagined the scuttling noise of chitinous legs? "The way it usually goes is: no survivors. There's no way to reverse the Killik Joining process that we know of. Force prevail us, I hope the crew has been able to stow away somewhere, but be prepared for the worst. I've been in-system for nearly two days now and there hasn't been a peep."

They couldn't see his face, but he was sure even the enviro-helm's intercom couldn't muffle the grim tone of his voice.

He held out his dataphone and the holoprojector whirred to life. A single beam diverged into a lattice of lights that quickly resolved into an image of the Haughty Platter - or rather, the schematic superstructure of any EF-70 Nebulon-class freighter in miniature.

"This is where we are," he continued, indicating their current location. "Looks like we have a turbolift coming up into a corridor that leads to either end of the ship. My guess is that there might be logs at the bridge to tell the story of what happened here. But I'm not sure where any survivors would try to hold out. What do you two think?"

@Wit @Painus

Spoiler: Current Location

Just ignore the location text if it doesn't reflect what we're writing, I cbf'd to change the tags right now