Eureka!

[Kara Cabor]

Kara was cursing and complaining in a surprising variety of languages as she trudged across the sand all by her lonesome. The fact that this little exercise was all her idea made her choice of language rather ironic.

The young woman was out in the desert looking for salvage. Every Zhellday, starting well before dawn when the world hadn't heated up so much, Kara would take a shovel, her long-bladed knife (stolen from a drunk in the Mos Eisley cantina) and her pistol (liberated from another drunk who clearly didn't know what to do with it) and go searching in a two-mile radius around the city (avoiding Tusken Raider territory) for anything useful. She didn't usually find much - the jawas got there first, or it was so useless even the jawas wouldn't take it. But today she had something else with her.

On Primeday, she'd been rummaging through the junkyard of one of her customers when she'd found an ancient, beat-up metal detector. The thing still worked, despite its obvious age, and she'd secreted it away in the bottom of her boot. That had been a really, really interesting conversation...

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Kara was jerked out of her reverie by the sound of the metal detector going off. Stopping, she slowly retraced her steps, and the beeping grew more insistent, before beginning to fade away after she passed a certain point. Carefully, she went back to the place where the beeping had first reached its peak. Then where it began to die off. Then into the middle of the area.

Kara grinned and clicked the metal detector off, setting it carefully off to the side. Then she slung her shovel down from across her back and started digging.

It was slow going - sand wasn't easy to dig - but after roughly half an hour of labor, Kara was rewarded with a metallic clang, the sound of metal hitting metal. Dropping to her knees, Kara carefully brushed the sand away, revealing a curved metal plate. Eyes gleaming, Kara swept away at the edges, inching forward warily at first, the eagerly. The metal plate was huge. She could eat for months, if she sold it to the right person!

Then, she reached too far and broke the fragile crust of sand. Her upper body pitched forward, and Kara yelped in surprise as she felt herself falling, flailing as the plummeted. She managed to land on her butt - which wasn't nearly padded enough - instead of her head, but her tailbone was not amused by the landing. Kara blinked her eyes open and looked around - and her jaw dropped.

What she'd found was no durasteel plate. It was a starship.

 

[Kara Cabor]

"Woah..." Kara breathed, staring around the ship, her mind racing. It wasn't a big ship - rather small, not meant for more than one person. But still impressive - all formerly-shiny metal and sleek lines. Her guess was some sort of one-person transport, or a starship. But she couldn't be sure without digging it out of the sand. That was going to take a lot of work.

"Best get to it then." Kara told herself, taking a running jump and the sides, clinging to the perforated hull like a lizard as she scrambled out of the starship to retrieve her shovel. She paused before she set to work, glancing at the sky. The suns were breaking over the horizon. She'd need to work quickly if she wanted to make any significant progress before it became too hot.

Kara started in the center of her find, working her way steadily outward in a circle until she reached the edge of the ship. Then, she'd dig down until she was roughly level with the middle of the ship, to make sure she wasn't missing anything.

The young woman had dug up most of the left half of the ship by nine-thirty in the morning, when she clambered down into the shaded part of the ship to rest, using a pile of sand as a pillow. Soon, she was snoring away, waiting for the sun to fall again so she could continue her work.

 

[Kara Cabor]

Kara's eyes blinked open, and she yawned hugely, stretching her arms as she rolled into a crouching position and slowly stood up. She was still for a few minutes, with a slightly stupefied look on her face as she tried to remember when she needed to do. Then her eyes lit up as she remembered. Grabbing the shovel, Kara got to work on the other half of the starship that needed unearthing before...she glanced at her chrono. Eleven-thirty tonight. It was roughly six now. So, she had five and a half hours to get the starship exposed so she could assess the condition and the repairs needed for it to function again.

At about nine-thirty, Kara stopped working for fifteen minutes to eat a quick dinner of a stolen ration bar before getting back to work. By the time it was too late - and Kara was too tired - to do any effective work, the ship was clear of sand up to the bottoms of her engines. The only thing Kara needed to do now was clear the sand out of the bottom of the starship, shore up the hull, replace any unusable parts, and run a working diagnostic once she thought everything was in working order. Then she'd need to stock it up for a voyage to somewhere else that was not Tatooine, because Kara was heartily tired of Tatooine. But to do all this, she'd need materials, and you could only get materials in the cities. That meant leaving her ship unattended, which Kara really didn't want to do, but apparently she had to, if she ever wanted to get her ship in working condition!

So Kara devised a risky but simple plan to cover up the ship. First, her writer employed the wonderful powers of Handwavium to conjure up a tarp, which covered the ship. Kara could then cover the tarp with sand, and when she needed it, roll back the tarp, hopefully retaining most of the sand, and work. Then repeat the process as necessary.