Smooth Criminal
You've been hit by... you've been struck by...
The message didn't arrive with a name attached to it. These type of invites never do. It moved quietly through the underworld, passed between bounty hunters in dim cantinas, traded on encrypted slicer channels, whispered about in docking bays where ships never stayed long. No origin. No traceable signal. Just a fragment of a holo and a promise that was too lucrative to ignore.
By the time it reached readers, it always began the same way. The flicker of a projection. A hooded figure. A voice stripped of anything human.
"If you are seeing this, you have a reputation. Not the kind that opened doors in the Core. The other kind."
A star map unfolded in the air, the Outer Rim, then beyond it. Past charted lanes. Past the edges of relevance. A single, dying system pulsed in red.
"A site. Ancient. Buried. Undisturbed."
The image shifted. Black sands stretched endlessly beneath a dim, rust-colored sky. Half-submerged in the dunes, a structure emerged, sharp angles, unnatural geometry, a gaping entrance that seemed to swallow the light around it.
A tomb with a giant skull at the entry point.
"Several teams have attempted entry." A brief distortion cut across the holo. For an instant, something moved within the darkness of the tomb's threshold, too fast, too wrong to focus on. "They have not returned."
There was no dramatics in the voice. No warning, either, just facts.
"Inside the structure is an artifact. A relic connected to the Force. Its retrieval is required." No explanation followed. No history. No reason why, just a picture of the relic in question. "All other treasures are yours to claim." That part spread fastest. It always did.
Ancient tombs meant credits, relics, lost technology, things collectors would kill to own. Enough to make even the cautious reconsider.
Enough to make the desperate stop thinking entirely.
The star map rotated again, locking onto the planet. Coordinates streamed beneath it. "Be advised: the structure is not stable. Interior scans are inconsistent. Recorded data suggests environmental fluctuation… and cognitive disruption." There was a faint break in the signal then, subtle, but present. Beneath the distortion, something almost sounded like a voice. Not the speaker's. Something else, gone as quickly as it came.
"Previous entrants reported auditory phenomena and hallucinations. The tomb has driven all who dared enter into madness." The figure leaned forward slightly, though its features remained hidden The projection began to degrade, edges breaking into static.
"Retrieve the relic if you dare. Fortune favors the bold."
The final words lingered a fraction longer than the rest. The holo collapsed in on itself, leaving only a string of coordinates and a credit marker so high it bordered on absurd. Across the Outer Rim, the same realization took hold in a dozen different places at once. A tomb no one had successfully entered. A relic tied to the Force, and a payout large enough to make the risk feel almost irrelevant. Ships would begin to change course. Deals would be abandoned. Debts ignored. Alliances would be reconsidered, because somewhere out there, on a dead world circling a fading star, something ancient waited beneath the sand.
And whatever it was…it had already begun calling to those willing to listen.
A Smooth Criminal
