But it wasn't the same…

[Tejori Lotor]

When Tejori finally ventured out, it took her an hour to get her door open. The sand was piled so high and packed so hard against it that she could move it only by centimetres at first. With each push, more of the desert rushed into her home. When she finally did have the door open, she had to spend another hour cleaning up, but that was mostly because she was working very slowly. Every time she bent and straightened up again, the lightheadedness would return and she would have to stop and steady herself with a hand on the wall.

The sun was hot and mean when she finally emerged. Miraculously, her speeder had been spared the worst of the storm. She dusted it off, checked the power, started the engine, and was pleasantly surprised when it responded without hesitation. She then closed up, mounted her speeder, and took the drive into the graveyard. She went slowly, mindful that she wasn't at her best.

The graveyard wasn't, strictly speaking, just one area but a vast expanse, and you could go for kilometres without seeing signs of anything, then crest some high dune and suddenly find yourself looking down at a field of wreckage. The storm had done more than reveal new finds, however; it had changed the terrain, reshaped the desert — as it so often did and it was a while before she realised how far out she'd gone, how long she'd been riding.

She stopped. Maybe two hours of daylight left, she calculated, and she'd need most of that to get back home. The temperature plummeted at night, got as cold as it could be hot during the day. And then there were the predators — most of which were nocturnal. Getting caught in the dark wouldn't be good.

She'd lost the day, but her mind was ticking over. If she found somewhere here to hold up for the night, she’d get an early start in the morning. She shut down the speeder, dismounted and climbed the nearest and tallest ship for a better view.

The metal, hot from a day in the sun, burned under her hands as she climbed. She used the edges of her wrap as makeshift gloves, but still the heat seeped through. There were more handholds and footholds than it had at first seemed, and she ascended quickly, focusing on what she was doing rather than what was above or quickly growing farther away below. Finally she stopped, then wedged herself into a gap where she could almost sit. It wasn't comfortable, but it was secure, at least for the moment.

The view was amazing. She'd climbed maybe a hundred metres, maybe higher, she thought. Looking back the direction she'd come, she could just make out what she guessed was Jaken, shimmering and distorted in the heat haze. Between her and the town stretched the majority of the known graveyard, the edge marked by the dead Destroyer, and from there even that appeared small. Tejori shifted her weight to the side and pulled her macrobinoculars from her satchel. Only one of the lenses worked, so it was more a macromonocular, she figured, but it worked all the same. She brought it to her eyes and scanned the desert spread out before her.

There were a couple of Teedos on the horizon, the range finder on the macros telling her they were over fifty kilometres out. They were walking their luggabeasts instead of riding them, which meant they'd been out on a long search and were returning home. She swept her gaze to the left, over the featureless desert. It was disappointing. There was nothing new to see, and the few wrecks she knew to be out that way were gone now, eaten once more by the desert.

Something dug at her vision, a flash-metal or glass — just for an instant, and Tejori swung her view back, slower, and felt her heartbeat quickening. She forced herself to look slowly and tried to retrace the path her eyes had taken, but it took genuine willpower to do it. The sun was dropping, and Tejori knew that whatever the light had caught, it had been a case of right place, right time; in minutes, perhaps even seconds, the sun would drop even lower, and what had been revealed might vanish forever.

She saw it again — the flare of sunlight glinting off exposed metal — and she refocused the macros and pulled out. What she found nearly made her fall off her perch.

It was a ship.

Tejori lowered the macros. She checked the sun again. By the time she climbed down, she'd have just enough time to make it back home before darkness fell. If she pushed to the wreck she would make it with daylight left, but there'd be no way to get back to her home before the desert turned cold and dangerous with nightfall and everything that came with it. She could leave it for tomorrow, head out at dawn, and hope that she would be able to find the wreck again and that nobody else would discover it before she could claim it.

It was those last two unknowns that made her decision: the fear that she would never be able to find it again and that someone would steal it from her.

She stuffed the macros back in her satchel and began the long climb down.

[member="Fiore Cœur de Noir"]

 

[Fiore]

The sun rose over the sand and shined against a small encampment and speeder. A figure moved in the encampment and started to break everything down. The small fire in the middle died down and the woman sat down near the smoldering flames chewing on the piece of meat she cooked. Looking around she needed to figure out the lay of the land. The stick picked against her teeth and then moved to survey her surroundings.

Sand was literally everywhere, there was so much sand Fiore stood there in awe at the place. The last planet she fully remembered was Kashyyyk, but that planet had several painful memories. The winds picked up sweeping against her face causing the sand to kick up and berate against her tanned skin. Fiore frowned, she came to the conclusion rather quickly that she didn’t like sand and would avoid any place that had it. Looking at her downed craft, she frowned. The small ships on Kashyyyk weren’t much especially since the Republic felt that the planet was pretty much safe from any sort of invasion. From her understanding only the Techno Union stood near and hadn’t made any aggression towards the Republic.

Still, she had been in solitary for so long only knowing the voices in her mind as company. Pulling down the white hood she wore, dark brunette hair whipped back from her face as the winds continued to pick up. The land was desolate and she couldn’t feel anything living on it, kneeling down her fingers pressed into the sand picking up a few grains of it. The texture of the sand was soft, which meant that the winds were constant and beat the grains to near dust. Fiore let the sand flow between her fingertips as she studied the surface of the planet. Tracking was going ot be hard here, with the constant winds and changing landscape it would make generating a map won’t be a lot of fun. Standing, Fiore pulled her hood back on and pulled herself onto the speeder.

Dust kicked up as she headed towards the the junkyard she had heard from whispers in the main town. There she would be able to find things she needed get out off the sand planet. Continuing outward she moved quickly through the dunes, the speeder climbed a large hill and suddenly stopped. Narrowing her eyes, Fiore came face to face with the graveyard of ships and deeper in the horizon, she found a ship. An eyebrow rose as a smirk formed across her lips. This was exactly what she needed, she had to get out of here and return to her original mission. The speeder flared to life and slid down the huge hill towards the ship.

[member="Tejori Lotor"]

 

[Tejori Lotor]

It was an old Starfield ZH-25 Questor-class light freighter and she recognised it instantly from her flight sim; she'd flown and crashed the earlier Z-10 Seeker model more times than she could count. The sun was kissing the horizon, bathing everything in soft gold light, and it made the ship look every bit as precious as she knew it was, because the greatest miracle of all — more than the fact that it hadn't yet been discovered and claimed by anyone, as far as she could tell, more than the fact that it was almost entirely uncovered — was that the ship was intact.

There was damage of course. She could see that even as she hopped off her speeder and stood staring at the vessel. The telemetry dish had been sheared, and the cockpit windshield was missing a pane, presumably shattered on impact, and the two that remained were webbed with cracks. Along the hull to her left was a gash that ran almost a meter and exposed corroded, melted wiring and hunks of missing cable. Whoever had brought it down had tried to take it through its landing cycle, and the front landing strut, at least as best she could see where the sand had shifted, was missing entirely.

But it was a ship, it was in one piece, and she had found it — and that made it hers. Her face felt strange; she had an odd ache in her cheeks, and as she went closer, she caught her reflection in what was left of the cockpit's windshield. She was filthy, but that was normal - her eyes obscured by smeared oil. What surprised her was that she was smiling, and when she tried to stop, the ache in her cheeks remained and she found that she was still doing it anyway.

[member="Fiore Cœur de Noir"]