Public Awake

[T-229]

Outer Rim - Unknown Ice World
ISD Basilisk - Recently Uncovered Ruin

It was cold.

It hadn't been cold in a long, long time.

Hoth? Csilla? He didn't remember the last time he felt cold. The armor usually did a good enough job, even during the cold nights. The Basilisk was usually pretty good about giving them the right stuff when they were sent out, so why was it so damn cold? The Troopers head turned from left to right as he began to stir, pulling a hand up to wipe away some of the frost from his face. Lips curling to a scowl as he forced his eyes to peel open.

Skin cracking and breaking as he managed to tear open the frozen lids, his gaze quickly cast into complete darkness. The light on the ship had long ago gone out, even emergency power running dry. It had been the final backup going that had awoken him.

They must have crashed.

Pieces fell into place almost instantly. The explanation of what had happened to him, the cold. His eyes swept over the darkness, hand coming up to press against the glass of the stasis tube. Gently his fingers probed, turning into a fist as he slammed hard against a small crack that had already formed. Another whack came quickly after the first, then another before the tube above shattered into a thousand pieces. T-229 blocked his own face, letting the glass scatter before he grabbed the plasteel edge and pulled himself free. Muscles aching, his very bones seemed to creak as he stepped into the stasis chamber.

With no light it was difficult to see, but all around him he could hear the echoes of movement, glass breaking, plasteel bending, the others were waking up. Though, T-229 knew that it wouldn't be all of them. A small frown touched the troopers face, a large breath drawing into his lungs. The cold air shocked through his system, drawing into his lungs until it seemed to choke him. He held it there. Feeling the pressure in his chest.

The Life.

"Armory!" He called out to the others. He knew they would as dazed as he was. Knew that they would have a thousand questions, but none of that mattered right now. They needed to know what was going on, but before that they could find out, they needed to make sure they could survive. Their armor would help, weapons would too. After they geared up they could hit the bridge and find out where they were.

Up above somewhere the officers would be pulling themselves together. Though, depending on how the Basilisk crashed, there was a very real possibility there were no more Officers left. Swallowing that grim thought and the responsibility that came with it, T-229 began to move towards the first bulkhead door. Cargo bay would have generator backups, and even after a crash there should be some fuel reserves. The Empire had meant for the Basilisk to survive on it's own, and survive they would. He would make sure of it. "Armor up and arm up!"

He called again to the men, encouraging them as he began to hear more thuds echo out throughout the stasis chamber. Troopers hitting the bulkhead door, some beginning to follow his orders, others still stretching before they moved. Not all of them would have made it, but it didn't matter how many. They'd make it through.

 

[Meliant]

Outer Rim - Unknown Ice World
ISD Basilisk - Bridge

Attn: T-229

Meliant strolled listlessly around the bridge. He would occasionally tip over a skeleton or drop down into one of the crew pits, just to poke around. Bored. Boring. The Death Troopers he'd brought with him were doing the real grunt work. One of them was hunched over a console, helmet removed, lips thinned in deep thought as she typed away. The rest were keeping watch in a far more disciplined manner than the Dark Side Elite.​

​

Well. Getting the emergency power back on had been a terrible ordeal. Meliant felt entitled to a little ambulatory.​

​

"They're thawed, sir," she announced. "Clones are waking up now."​

​

Meliant removed a little grey kepi from one of the corpses in the technician pit and spun it around on his finger. "Excellent work, Franceline."​

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"My name isn't Franceline."​

​

"Oh? Then who am I thinking of...?" He made a clucking sound. "Heheh... No one important. Get their attention on the intercom."​

​

A few button taps later, not-Franceline declared, "Nothing, sir. Not enough power or it's fried."​

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"What a shame."​

​

Meliant leaped out from the pit, landing nimbly not too far from the station the death trooper was managing.​

​

"If they're worth all this trouble, they'll make their way up anyway." He ambled over and deposited the ancient kepi he'd stolen right next to her helmet. "Start opening doors. Herd them here."​

---​

The clones didn't have to hammer at the bulkhead for much longer. Slowly, the aged durasteel rumbled and scraped open just enough for them to pass through in single file. Emergency lights flickered intermittently down the corridor, beckoning them in a particular direction.​

 

[Hubert Starhopper]

Objective: Ascertain What Piece of The Sky Fell...



Tags: T-229 Meliant

Gear: Tool-Kit, Custom-Built Blaster Pistol, The Star-Scraper



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Hubert is sitting in the cockpit of the Star-Scraper, an old salvaging ship abandoned long ago that he himself pieced back together with stolen parts from junkyards and sand-crawlers. Rusted, rattling, and requiring more maintenance than he can provide with his limited resources, it still holds strong. He takes a drag from the cigarette hanging from his mouth, his tired and baggy eyes fixated on the planet before him as he remains stationary in the void of space. An ice-planet... A planet which those whom grew up in a desert have grown to detest. But he needs the salvage. Fuel, spare parts, any food that may have kept preserved within the wrecks that rest below. It's either risk freezing to death here, or risk starving to death when he runs out of fuel and food with no allies to call upon. With another drag, and an exhaling of the smoke through his nostrils, he grips the controls to his ship, and pitches the pile of junk forward to the planets atmosphere.

Upon entry, the sudden shift in temperature sends a crack from left to right across the glass of his cockpit. It begins to web out until finally the structural integrity gives, and the glass explodes, sending shards into Hubert's face. Upon instinct, he removes one hand from the controls to hold his new cuts, and in an event of instability due to the ship's pressure dropping, he is unable to hold it steady with only one hand at the wheel. The Star-Scraper begins in a corkscrew descent, and even now with both hands reuniting to save himself, it isn't pulling out of it.

Alarms are blaring, inner-plating begins to strip off of the walls around him, his ship quite literally coming apart the same way it was put back together. Painstakingly, and piece by piece. He looks through what used to be his protective shield of glass, staring out across the icy depths below. And as the ship makes another full rotation in its downward spiral, Hubert's eyes widen and his panic rises. Suddenly, he hopes that the crash is fatal...

An Imperial ship, unmistakably- even in the brief moment he had to witness it and its vast expanse he could tell. He's been running from them long enough now that he can practically smell an Imperial approaching. Wanted for grand theft, arson, murder, smuggling, and escaping slavery, (Among other, less-important things...) his hopes of finding a warm fire and good conversation are next to nil... And from the look of things, he isn't going to be landing too far away from their crash site.

"Some kinda' sick fuckin' joke..." He says to himself, laughing more out of nervousness and anxiety rather than amusement. His only hopes of making it out of this as a free man, are if those Imps have better things to do than sift through criminal records, but given their knack for filing information, if they haul him in, they will likely look into who he is anyways for a report, or whatever it is they do officially...

Another full rotation, and the ground replaces every thought he could possibly muster. The sound of metal smacking the earth echoes like an explosion, and the ship takes less time to lose its bits-and-bobs. First to go is the landing gear, ripped completely off of the undercarriage of the ship, and as the body makes contact with the ground, the framing for the thrusters gives, and they too separate, and disappear along the trail his first ship was eating into the top-layer of this planet, exploding into two separate balls of fire. And finally, the ship meets a rise in the ground, and its nose bites it, sending the hull into a somersault that could be measured in yards by the dozen, and it smacks into its point of rest upon its topside, keeping Hubert suspended upside down as he is rendered unconscious. Bleeding from the head from both blunt and laceration trauma, and exposed to the elements. And as the lights fade in his ship, it too begins to slip into a state of unconsciousness.

His rescue would now unfortunately fall into the hands of those whom he has spent years trying to avoid, all because of poor planning, or a lack thereof...

 

[T-229]

"Sir?" The Trooper stropped in his tracks as the lights came flickering on, half a dozen steps already through the bulkhead.

T-229's eyes flickered down, followed the lights, and frowned. Were the Officers already awake? No, protocol wasn't to direct. Everyone on the Basilisk knew exactly what to do in the event of an emergency like this.

Something was wrong.

"Armor up and arm up." T-229 repeated the order a second time, and in a second the other clones turned left and away from the Emergency Lights. None of them questioned the why, they trusted him impliclity. Quickly they made their way through the halls of the ship, moving away from the stasis chamber and towards the armory just two doors down.

T-229 counted thirty threetroopers with him, though he was sure more would be trailing behind soon. By the state of the ship it was clear they would be lucky if they had a full platoon still aboard. There was no telling how long they had been buried, though the Basilisk looked as though it had been beat to hell and a half. He didn't remember an attack, or a shortage. What the kriff happened? Last he remembered was Palpatine's speech before Endor and then...had the stasis chambers glitched?

While his thoughts twirled, grasping for some deep memory, the others went to work on the manual release for the armory door.

All of them together made short work of it, pulling open the bulkhead and entering the combination for the lever. Before long each of the thirty three troopers was dressed in his full armor, e-11's slung firm and pistol's stowed away. "Grab whatever else we can."

There was no question from the others, but one of the Troopers stared in silent question as he began to grab some of the Thermal Detonators.

"We're following those lights now." T-229 explained as he grabbed a DLT-19 from the wall.