The subs shuddering was nearing the point of catastrophic failure. Warning lights strobed across the cockpit. Ancient metal groaned somewhere beyond the hull as thousands of tons of ocean and wreckage shifted against one another.
For one sickening moment, Ala felt the sub begin to slide. Her mind pushed back on it, the Force connecting even in the depths, with millions of lifeforms all about them. The sub lurched to a stop, almost throwing Ala off her seat.
She instinctively knew it was not just her push through the Force that kept them alive, but Katherine's apetitude for piloting the submersible.
Ala's eyes flicked sideways just long enough to see the strain in the Epicanthix's posture, the white-knuckled grip on the controls, the stubborn determination written across her face. The thrusters screamed against the water.
Slowly, the vessel stabilised. The alarms died one by one. Silence returned to the cockpit. Ala released a long held breath.
"Nicely done." The corner of her mouth tugged upward.
"I was beginning to think I might actually have to pilot this thing myself." A quick wink followed.
"Good thing you're here."
The opening she had created was finally visible now. A ragged wound cut into the side of the facility. Beyond it sat darkness. A forboding, untouched darkness. One that screamed for them to turn back.
For Ala, there was no going back. The vessel slipped through the breach and into the corpse of the installation.
The interior hangar was colossal. Floodlights swept across cavernous walls of black alloy and transparisteel. Massive gantries hung from the ceiling like skeletal remains, many collapsed into twisted heaps below. Thick curtains of algae drifted through the stagnant water. Entire sections of the structure had buckled inward under centuries of pressure, leaving jagged scars through decks and maintenance platforms.
It looked less like a laboratory. More like the remains of a drowned city. Coral had claimed everything. Red and white growths spread across walls and machinery alike. Strange deep-sea organisms pulsed softly in the darkness, transforming the ancient Sith facility into something halfway between machine and reef.
Yet somehow...a glimmer of power remained. Faint strips of emergency lighting flickered weakly along distant corridors. Ancient systems still fought for life.
Ala's hands tightened around the controls. She felt it. Nothing of note showed on the sensors. But through the Force there was a tug on a single thread of consciousness, one both hers and not hers all at once.
"There..." The word escaped her lips almost as a whisper.
The submarine rotated slowly. The lights swept across rows of shattered cylindrical pods. Dozens of them. Most had burst open long ago. Their transparisteel fronts cracked or missing entirely. Corals and sea grass grew through them. Tiny fish darted through chambers that had once housed life.
It was a nursery turned tomb.
Then the lights settled upon one pod near the centre of the chamber.
One. Still intact.
Its transparisteel was obscured beneath centuries of coral growth and marine life. Thick clusters of calcified organisms clung to its surface. Vines of seaweed drifted lazily around it.
But beneath the growth...a faint amber light glowed.
Ala stared at it. Her grief arrived without introduction, washing over her like a tsunami. Her throat tightened. Around that single surviving pod lay the remains of countless others, broken and silent forever. She knew what they had been. Who they had been. Lives prepared for a purpose they had never chosen.
"After all these years. One...still...lives."
