Duel Unreasonable Blood

[Tansu Treicolt]

ALARIS PRIME | KASHYYYK SYSTEM
STATION DESIGNATION: ARCAS-9 LISTENING POST [DECOMMISSIONED & UNSAVOURILY REFERRED TO AS THE GLOWHOLE]
00:45:00 TO AUCTION START
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After all the years of war and neglect, the station probably shouldn't have still been in orbit. It sagged like a busted lung and wheezed every time the hull shifted. Like one bad cough would break it apart. Too much old metal and not enough gravity integrity, only held together by rust, wires, and whatever grease-stained prayers smugglers believed in.

At its core, a molten eye glowed dull orange behind a fortress of broken hull plating. Someone had turned it on to time with the pending auction (or so Tansu assumed; otherwise, this thing was just glowing in space for millennia or two). Towers jut out at impossible angles, some snapped clean off and left to drift.

Once, perhaps, it was a Jedi post—quiet, orderly, full of meaning, home to heroes but today, it served as a glorified auction house for the desperate and the dangerous. Word was, a holocron was being auctioned here. An expensive one. Old. Real old. Golden-age kind of old. The kind of artifact that made people crawl out of their holes.

She was one of them.

One of...many of them. Tansu could already see the ships of others docking and gathering at the main dock; all lit up like a forge with humming shields and exposed repulsors.

"Not-a-that-a-way my friend." Tansu informed her co-pilot, Amos the family cat. "I'm all for kickin' down the door and causin' a ruckus, but that ain't it today." She cocked a grin at the cat, who barely listened to any of her ramblings. "Not to start with at least."

Instead, she took the long loop around the station's underbelly, skimming close enough that her cockpit instruments started to sweat. Down past where the platinf was stripped raw and scored black from old laser fire and bleeding coolant into the vacuum. She found what she was looking for nestled between two collapsed struts: a maintenance crawl, blown half-open in what looked like a decades-old impact. Big enough to squeeze through, small enough no one cared to patch it.

"Bingo."

Docking was a delicate affair. Her ship, featherlight, rest on the wreckage with a magnetic clamp and held fast. Life support pinged green for local atmosphere, but only just barely.

"You comin' or stayin'?" She asked the cat as she went through the final docking practices and finally turned to open her empty pack for him to leap into. "Alright parder, off we go."

Tansu popped the hatch, pulled on a breather mask just in case, and ducked into the breach.

Inside, it was darker than sin and smelled like scorched wire and mold. Even through the breather mask! She dropped into a narrow passage, knees bent, one hand trailing the wall as she moved forward through the guts of the station.

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Vyrin Treicolt
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