1
“Beak!” Taran called from Myatil’s aft access hatch. “Try it now!”
There was a muffled “Of course, sir,” from beyond the hull of the shuttle, and Taran could hear the ships’ engine powering up. Watching the readouts he had plugged into the power core relay, Taran tracked the amount of energy funneling into the main engine. When it reached the percentage he wanted, he leaned on the hydrospanner he had set on the newly installed hyperdrive relay.
The relay began taking power, and the hyperdrive started coming online. Taran held his breath.
The readouts suddenly went red, and the main engine changed its note from a musical whine to a sharp coughing.
“Shut it down!” Taran yelled, sparks flying from the connectors. One spark landed on his sleeve and immediately started lighting his arm on fire. He slapped at the sleeve. “Shut it down now, Beak!”
“Understood, sir,” Beak chirped. The engine began powering down, and the furious storm of electricity died down to a more manageable amount.
Taran would have preferred that amount to be zero and never exist, but you can’t have everything.
Blowing out a heavy breath, Taran leaned away from the access hatch and rested on his ankles. When he began working on connecting and priming the navicomputer, Taran noted that the primary relay for the hyperdrive had become corroded during storage. Not willing to risk a cataclysmic event should the shuttle attempt to make a jump, Captain Gabin sent a Sidewinder crewmember out to find a new relay.
Normally, that would have been the end of the problem. Relays were common enough that even dirtbound merchants had good odds of one relay being in stock. The hyperdrive relay Captain Gabin bought for the Myatil was, allegedly, an exact model based on Myatil’s company blueprints, but Beak, during an inspection of the item upon arrival, noted that this particular relay was based on a more recent version of the Myatil shuttlecraft.
2
Whereas the older model relay had been built to channel the intense energy the Myatil’s engine would shunt to jump to hyperspace, the newer models were considered more ‘energy efficient’ and had multiple pathways to channel the incoming energy, so as to work in tandem with an engine’s built-in governors. With the older engine, which had no such governors, it was like watching a Houk trying to put on a Jawa’s robes.
With much the same outcome, Taran thought, grimacing at the hydrospanner he somehow kept in his hands. The excessive power outflow had overloaded the tools’ own motor, not to mention warping the bit. That end of the tool was smoking.
The sound of a droid’s joints brought Taran out of his reverie. He looked up to see Beak standing over him.
“I take it, sir,” Beak offered both diffidently and somehow with a hint of sarcasm, “that we should take a break? I can fetch you a new set of tools to ruin.”
“No, thank you, Beak,” Taran answered. He tossed the hydrospanner aside, where it landed next to a waste bin. “I don’t want to admit defeat just yet. Better tell the Captain that we’re having trouble with this relay. I wish Lina was still here.” Once Captain Gabin had decided that Taran would handle the Myatil’s hyperdrive, he sent Lina out in the speeder-truck to one of the nearby towns for the day, finishing up the last of Saulapran’s contracts. “She’s better at this sort of repair work than I am.”
“Indubitably, sir,” Beak responded. “But the mention of taking a break had a secondary point to it.” The military droid held out a distinct datapad; Taran’s personal datapad, in fact. “You have a message, sir, but it had an encryption I’m unfamiliar with.”
“That means it’s from my boss,” Taran said, focusing on the wording as he stood up and took the device. “He has some odd habits.” He began keying through the encryption, holding the datapad away from the droids’ photoreceptors, when a message flashed across the screen for an instant.
Open when you are alone.
Taran winced, making an effort to seem exasperated. It did not take much in the way of effort.
3
“I’ll need to read this privately, Beak,” he said, waggling the device, and its blank screen, in his hand. “Yeah, we’ll take a break. See if you can pull up any schematics for a convertor or adaptor for that relay, all right?”
“Of course, sir,” Beak said, bowing as far as his upper chassis would allow. As the droid walked away, Taran walked to the far side of the cargo hold and fished out a rectangular datacard. Sliding it into a hidden slot on the datapad, Taran waited until a small cord unlocked from the datapad’s underside. Plugging the cord into a keypad and switching the datapad over to ‘hypercomm mode’, he watched the decryption process run through its sequence and the message restarted.
“Open when you are alone. Oblivion is pleased with your results in the field, but gives caution: your upcoming mission has factors he is invested in. You’ll be dealing with an Inquisitor during the mission. Don’t know when she’ll arrive or how she’ll handle her mission, but your orders from Oblivion are clear: Do Not Get Her Attention. I don’t know what’s going to happen out there, but I assume it’ll end badly if you don’t follow these instructions. Otherwise, carry on.”
Taran reread the message twice, just to make sure, before pressing the keys that would erase the message and send a signal through the Sidewinder’s hypercomm to erase the message’s entire transmission history. So, Taggert thought it necessary that he knew about a possible hiccup in the upcoming mission.
Who was it that they were picking up, he wondered. He went through the logic of the question just as he had been taught. If the Inquisitor was coming to Saulapran to catch the passenger, then they could be only one thing…
A Jedi…
Swift's Corner 