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starwarsoutcast · 2 years ago

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Chapter 2

Ghyff was not his home. Deklan Mau had no home.

He was sixteen--a man grown for his people, or so he had been told--but he had never known the comfort of a star's warmth, or dirt and gravity beneath his boots. He had been born in space, hundreds of parsecs from Kiffex. When asked, he'd insist it didn't bother him. Life was simpler when you only had yourself, and your work. But a Kiffar without a clan was a tragic thing, or so he had been told by the older salvagers.

A strand of his thick black hair fell out onto his forehead from where he had tied it back, but he could do nothing about it now. Sealed in a spacesuit, a tether clipped to his waist leading back behind him and another anchored down on the surface he stood on, he stretched his arms out and let them float slack in the vacuum of space. Spread out beyond him, the desolate star clusters lacking in habitable planets burned faintly all the way out to the wilds of Unknown Space, a thousand places to hide far away or to seek out something undiscovered. Sometimes, a home planet is overrated.

"Dek? How many was it?" The voice crackled through the static of a two-decade old comm.

He sighed. "It was three. Three of the big walkers. I don't know how many of the little ones were there." Veeda never stopped asking the same inconsequential questions, over and over. He didn't mind answering them...the first time. After that, it was irritating.

"Skywalker took out three of these things? That's so kriffing mad!"

Deklan couldn't be seen by the little Roonan, but he rolled his eyes anyway. "No, Veeda. He took out one. The other Rogue pilots took out two more." He looked up from the durasteel plating under his magnetic boots. Or rather, his head was looking up, but he oriented upside down and looking toward the sickly yellow gas giant. Ghyff. The only light the galaxy could spare for them.

Veeda tinkered under a panel some five meters away, but both were careful to keep their little personal shields engaged and--if possible--keep a large bit of metal between themselves and the planet. Ghyff's sorry excuse for an irridiated atmosphere would strip the hides right off them otherwise. Not many of the space station's rubbish workers would take such a small being on as a partner, but Veeda had a lot going on under the surface. His brain worked much faster than his body, and he was eager to keep busy, unlike a lot of his peers.

"Tow cables," Veeda chatted away. "What a concept." His raspy little laugh came through the comm. "I bet if the Empire had any brains about weapons design, they would have ended the Alliance that very day. Of course, it's hard to predict what a Jedi will do in a battle. I was reading about this armored battle droid column this one time, absolutely decimated on Dantooine-," he stopped for a moment and addressed the panel, "Oh, hold on now, this isn't accepting my code for some reason."

Not wanting to encourage the grey-skinned whelp any further in the history discussion, Deklan just growled and peered around the big conical piece of space trash they were latched to. It was, best he could tell, the left-rear 'foot' of an Imperial walker, with only perhaps half of the stilt still attached. How the planetary assault transport ended up floating in pieces in the void of space, there was no way of knowing. It was a rarity, and the Fetcher wanted it. Fetcher got what he wanted, always.

"Well," Veeda said with another hollow chuckle, "The data tapes are fried, nothing particularly interesting in the tactical relays anyhow. I guess yet another tow cable is going to take one last piece of this big guy out." He straightened up, only a meter tall or so even in his bulky space suit, and punched commands into his wrist cuff. At his behest, the three monolithic droids approached from their position above, where they had parked. Each would tether the walker wreckage and pull it out of the scrap heap toward the Reclaimer.

Deklan focused on the junkscape on the other side of the walker foot. He could spy more Imperial tech floating, mostly burned out keels of Star Destroyers missing their armored hulls after already being picked clean. But dotted throughout their bigger pits were some flimsy shuttle pieces. Also, half a ring section of a droid control ship burned to a cinder by Ghyff's radiation over decades. Even the oblong silhouette of an Old Republic cruiser dating back at least a few centuries. Everything withered and dissipated, eventually. History separated into atoms, like grains of sand in a wind.

The droids' tow lines snaked out to the walker foot, reeled out slowly and magnetized much in the same way the two scrappers were by their boot soles. "What would you have done in the rebellion?" Veeda asked as he watched them approach. "I think I could have been one of the Pathfinders. I could slice you into an Imperial blockhouse faster than any droid, you know that."

"You're not a fighter," Deklan said instantly. It was another old conversation, rehashed just to pass the time. He never took his eyes off the twisted hulks. He thought he had spotted something, but wanted to be sure. Any Ghyff salvager worth his air supply kept eyes peeled for something valuable among the detritus.

Veeda continued to give him grief. "Most of the Rebels weren't fighters, you know. But at a desperate hour, any one of them would pick up a blaster."

"We don't have any blasters."

The Roonan snorted ruefully. "Doesn't matter. Anyone can turn the tide of a battle."

But his partner wasn't listening. A Kiffar's eyes were nothing special; he couldn't see multiple spectrums or telescopically. But Deklan Mau had focus. That made a lot of difference. He saw a ship that did not appear often in the Ghyff Station holoscreen records, where young scrappers were schooled in which bits of plating were the most favored and which were garbage. "That's a Munificent-class frigate."

"I don't know that one," Veeda said nonchalantly.

"Confederate warship, built by the Banking Clan," Dek explained. "Flimsy little things. Flew in packs."

Veeda turned to him then. His tone never changed. "Muunilist design? Pfft. What did they know about spacefaring?" But while he said it, he made a deliberate gesture with his stubby hands. A question.

Deklan returned the signal with one of his own. A positive answer. "Not a lot. That's probably why it's here, turning black." He then reached up and flipped his comm switch on the helmet.

Once both of them were on a different channel--one not monitored by Fetcher's command center aboard the space station looming over them from high orbit--Veeda let his excitement be known. "Munificent-class?! That had a full combat array. Think it's still intact?"

"Can't tell from here. It's blocked."

The droids had connected with the walker scrap, but they would sit stationary until given the command to reel it in. Veeda bounced as much as the spacesuit and the shield system would allow him. "I could disconnect, and we could go check it before anyone notices."

Deklan was excited, too. But he didn't want to get his hopes up. "It's far. Might not be worth the trip. Now this," he rapped his fist on the plating of the walker piece, "this is a sure thing. Never give up a done deal to go chasing an Idiot's Array."

"You've never played sabacc a day in your life," Veeda shot back.

He nodded. "That's right. Once I've got something, it's mine. I don't play around with it."

The kid shrugged and hit the command for the droids to finish capturing. "Maybe tomorrow?"

"Maybe tomorrow."

Flipping back to the monitored channel, Dek was only barely able to release the grip on his chest that came with the find. It was a slim chance that any of the old Clone Wars frigate was still operational, but they didn’t need a ship. They didn't even need a working gun platform. They merely needed one intact piece. A simple arc relay actuator from an ion cannon turbine, no bigger than his hand. No sooner had he flipped back than Veeda went right back to a casual conversation about AT-AT struts, but then even the relative calm of that was breached.

"Eight-Tee-Four-Seven, meh gooda chu packa jeer-ut!" a casually intense whine came over the comm. It was Zurf, one of the Fetcher's men aboard Ghyff Station. He was supervising all the junk prospectors from the comfy chair in the command center.

The two youths looked to each other and shrugged. "Oh, we had a little static," Deklan explained. "Had to cycle our comms to clear it. Can't be too careful once we start moving this big hunka."

"Communications," Veeda agreed. "It's just another safety tether." When the Kiffar teen threw up his hands incredulously at this, he added "Uh, my trainer said that once I think."

Zurf was not a former Imperial. If he had been, it was likely he would have pulled a much more prestigious duty among the Fetcher's loyalist crew. Instead, he was stuck with traffic control, and though it was an assignment he plainly loathed, he took it seriously. "Chupaaano wid roahoho, naresto bah." It was a warning. Not a friendly one, but very explicit.

"Veeda, let's go." Deklan didn't want to lose out on the salvage. With a little luck, they might use the unusual find to get on Fetcher's good side for a change. While Ghyff wreckers didn't exactly get paid, they could find their quarters exchanged for a something larger, or closer to the station's warmer nacelles. One tough Bith girl he knew had found a neat stack of rations in her bunk after bringing the old pirate a true treasure, an intact Sienar-brand hyperdrive core. "Veeda?"

The droids had winched in the walker foot and were awaiting the command to return to the station. But it never came, and they floated patiently.

"Sorry, Dek. I'll just be a few ticks."

He spun as fast as zero gravity would allow, and sure enough he saw the little grey lunatic was out in the open, using his suit thrusters to dive toward Ghyff's oppressive rays. "Get back here, you damned fool."

"Can't now!" Veeda called back. He sounded strained, but he was nearly half a klick away already, so there was no way to gauge how hard he was trying to maintain course. "Just let me take a quick look at something!"

Deklan reached for his own wrist cuff and tried to bring up their suit readouts. The Roonan used much less oxygen than his bigger partner, but he was more susceptible to the radiation. His suit would fail quickly. "Leave it. We can come back tomorrow."

"No! Come on, Dek. No more tomorrows."

The further the kid got toward the old frigate, the more Zurf's howls of disbelief and rage amplified in Deklan's ear. They were going to catch hell for this. But Veeda couldn't be slowed. He twisted around to put his boots first into the dive, and in the processed threaded himself through the hollowed out ring of an old Alderaanian booster. The Banking Clan ship was half-buried between a flat T-shaped capital ship bridge that was aged at least three decades in the yellow, corrosive glow, and the formidable back section of a Rebellion medical transport.

Turning the comm channel off to cease the noise from Zurf, Deklan punched in a command for one of the tug droids. It released the AT-AT piece immediately and fired out the magnetic tether once again. Only this time, the youth unhooked his safety line from the salvage and dove out into the blackness. It was a race he was destined to lose, but the magnet in his boot heel snagged onto the droid's tether and evened the odds in no time. He punched in the command to reel himself back in. "Tow cables," he groaned. "What a concept." Using the droid's propulsion instead of his suit's, he could possibly catch up.

Veeda either wasn't hearing him because he hadn't changed to their private channel, or else he was just trying to focus as much as possible as his thrusters sputtered trying to wrap him around a decrepit chunk of durasteel before he could splat against it. Just as soon as he had escaped that, his vector carried him way too close toward a sea of jagged, broken TIE solar panels that had been all dumped out together into orbit like so many shards of a broken bottle.

"Veeda, look out!" Dek couldn't do anything more than yell, his tug droid only capable of racing toward the flying grey spec using small repulsorlift engines. And without any substantial gravity well to slow his friend, the chasm between them widened.

His thrusters no longer responding, the Roonan wailed in terror and covered his helmet with both hands out of instinct. As he bounced off the flat surface of one black and grey panel, his scream was cut short, but he grunted into the comm once, twice, three times. Once for every angular titanium foe that pummeled him. In the vacuum, his shield's splash of energy made no sound at each impact. It just silently pulsed and absorbed only a fraction of the force of the blows.

Deklan reached for his wrist and hit another sequence. The droid, having reeled him in already, protested the normally nonsensical instructions. The bot couldn't speak, it was very sparsely designed and assembled, but it could protest what he was planning due to its basic safety protocols. He entered an override code, and without another moment of delay the droid fired the tow cable out toward Ghyff, and toward the sea of broken TIE wings. Deklan Mau was still attached, and had transformed himself into a crude torpedo on a string.

The keel of an Imperial Raider loomed up from his right, but one instant of rearing up his tethered leg and kicking away helped avoid collision. It wasn't exactly a steering yoke, but it would do. The lack of substantial gravity allowed him to alter his course with little exertion, but it also made it nearly impossible to slow down. Dek shot through a cluster of molten starfighters whose shapes had all eroded into vague craggy lumps of black. One came near enough he could make out a row of five enemy fighter silhouettes etched across the fuselage, a testament to the kills made by a pilot also long ago perished.

Veeda breathed raggedly into the comm.

Unable to answer, for fear he would lose his concentration and splatter himself, Deklan aimed for the TIE panels and took a deep, calming breath of his own. Once he entered the gauntlet of reinforced titanium and durasteel, he used his free foot to batter away at every piece that came near enough. Any puncture of his suit, any breach of his shield, and the radiation would cook him. He reared up and planted his free foot on the flat edge of an angular wing that likely had belonged to an Interceptor. He stepped into it, pushing off and using the momentum.

That did it. He reached the other side of the flotsam and turned around to see the tug droid carefully navigating around every panel it could, occasionally taking one impact in order to avoid five more. Dek wasn't worried. The droids were reinforced for just such a situation, and if need be, they would automatically return to the station if not given new orders after a certain amount of time floating in the black. He needed to find Veeda.

Beyond the TIE components, most everything was blackened with decades of corrosion. But against the backdrop of a tube-shaped transit ship, there shown a lone spot of grey. After the droid had exited the fray, Dek took a moment to allow the machine to reel in the cable. Then he fired himself again, aiming directly for where his partner cowered in the shadow of the starliner.

Veeda was not completely conscious, his big eyes dull and unseeing through the visor of his helmet. But his breathing was stable, and his suit was intact.

"You dummy," Deklan said, and hauled the smaller being onto his shoulder. "Feel free to die. Even if you don't, Fetcher might actually kill us for this."

Once they were back aboard the station, with artificial gravity and radiation filters, Deklan finally allowed himself to crack under the weight of his limp friend, and the dread that filled him. Ghyff Station was small, given its population and number of functions, and word of Veeda's stunt was bound to travel quickly among the denizens. No doubt Zurf had also alerted the rest of the pirates from his console in the command chamber.

There were no medical droids aboard, no bacta either. Not much more than a basic aid cache. The pirates may have had something more robust, but they certainly weren't going to share it with their laborers. Fetcher had, according to the stories, taken command of the Imperial corvette he was stationed on and fled during one of the last big battles of the war. There was nothing military or disciplined about his crew anymore--it had been more than twenty years--but if one Imperial praxis was destined to stay with them for life, it was the instinct to instantly use up every resource available and save nothing in reserve. And Deklan had grown up identifying himself and the other Ghyff wreckers as one such resource.

A handful of worried, unwashed youths rushed up to meet them when the airlock opened, and they flooded Dek with questions.

"What happened?"

"What was he doing unsecured?"

"Did his suit breach?"

"How long did he spend in the glow?"

"Did he find it?"

This last question came from a human female, perhaps a year or two older than Deklan Mau. She had very big green eyes, and her skin seemed impossibly pale to him. Rhinn. She was always acting as taskmaster, assuming command whenever a crowd brewed on the station. Though there were nearly three thousand of them aboard, half of them scrappers who saw danger like this every day, Rhinn seemed determined to paint Dek as some class of reckless dolt who wasn't worth trusting with important tasks. He hated her for thinking that of him.

He handed Veeda over to several of the older scrappers. "He didn't get near enough."

"This is not going to go…unnoticed." She removed the Roonan's helmet and placed her hand along the back of his neck, looking for signs of life and glancing gravely up at the Kiffar. "You think he'll make it through a stint?"

Deklan shrugged. In truth, it depended heavily on who Fetcher blamed for the accident, and which of his pirates would be tasked with doling out the punishments. Some of them took pity upon younglings and beings of smaller size. Hopefully one of them would see the injuries on Veeda's form and conclude he would learn enough of a lesson from it. As for Dek himself, he knew deep in his stomach that he would catch an electro-baton, even though he had still managed to bring in the AT-AT strut.

After Rhinn devoted all of her attention to Veeda, and began calling out instructions to the others for steering the salvage around to the appropriate berth, Deklan took everyone ignoring him as permission to step away and look for a place to rest. He wound around the circumference of the oblong station, trying his best to keep calm.

Stupid little worm, he thought. He was just as excited as Veeda had been, and yet he had managed to wait for a more opportune moment. But all the scrappers had been looking for months now for the appropriate piece of wreckage. Any ship, blackened to hell or otherwise, that had an intact ion turbine with the compatible actuator. He guessed that Veeda just couldn't pass up being the hero to every scrumrat on Ghyff Station. The kid had a sickness for wanting his name remembered.

"Deklan!" he heard echo down the corridor, the boom of indignation sending the smaller children scurrying behind wall panels. Rhinn had been following him the entire way. When she got close enough to whisper she said, "Did you see it for sure?"

He chuckled. "I guess Veeda's fine," he shot back. "You stopped worrying real quick. Or is your big rebellion just more important than his sorry hide?"

Remorse broke out across her face, and she looked down at her worn and faded boots. "I know you care for him, as much as you crow otherwise. But he was trying to help all of us. Without that actuator, there is no way we will last five minutes against Fetcher and the Forgotten."

Dek sniffed. Everyone had a part to play in Rhinn's grand scheme. His was to lead a squad of fighters onto the Razor-class corvette and commandeer it by lethal force, if necessary. It was a job he had inherited from the last being with a large enough frame for fighting. And that poor sprog had been beaten to death by Zurf. Veeda was too proud of his role in building the arc relay that would disable the decrepit Imperial ship long enough for Rhinn's grand mutiny, and now that pride may have killed him in three different ways at once. "Pray to your rebel heroes' holograms that he lives, otherwise your plan is charred to a crisp."

"What is wrong with you?" she burst. "Why can't you see what we're trying to do? Even if Veeda lives, this isn't a real life!" The earnest choke of her voice was nearly pitiful. "Dek, I need to know that you believe in the cause!"

He turned away and said softly. "I don't believe in anything but me. You think you're Leia Organa? Great. Enjoy watching everyone who follows you die for your sense of freedom."

"I'd rather die fighting for our freedom than die slowly fishing for chunks of metal, or at the whims of a drunken kung who fancies himself a warlord."

Deklan felt like grabbing her and shaking her until that junk fell out of her head for good. "I'd rather not die at all," he said instead. When Rhinn sputtered at this, he turned on his heel and stomped away down the cramped corridor. Over his shoulder he called, "None of this really matters, Rhinn. Learn that. This is Ghyff. We work, then we die. And your rebel heroes aren't coming to save the day."

He rounded a corner and left her there, and within a dozen steps he regretted every word. It felt wrong to speak out against the scrappers' ongoing plans, as if he were somehow allying himself with the pirates. Not that Dek didn't believe what he said; the mutiny was pointless. It just gave a few scores of damn fool kids something to brighten their day. The thought that whatever happened to them, be it Ghyff's poison emissions, or a salvage accident, or the Fetcher and his disgusting crew...that they were working toward a big victory. That secretly they plotted to win the day, because they were right and just. It was romantic nonsense, and Rhinn was spreading it as far as she could across the station.

Veeda might die because of her promises of false hope. Dek's veins turned to ice at the thought, and suddenly his thoughts of Rhinn changed from pity and mere scorn to a fury. He grumbled as he walked, forming more words of bile that he had not the nerve to say to her face. But his anger didn't vent, it only mounted higher. Soon he lost control of himself, and by the time he had regained his wits he was horrified to see and feel himself slamming fists into a thick conduit jutting from the wall.

He had no idea how long he had be pounding on the tube full of circuitry and grinding his teeth. Time seemed to stretch in a funny kind of way as he focused only on the knot of anxious rage cinching his chest tighter and tighter. When he finally took control again, he saw that the conduit had been dented and bent into a sickening shape and his hands ached. He breathed easy, and whispered, "Why can't everyone just leave me alone?"

As if a wry answer to the question, something hard and sharp like bone smacked across the back of his head, and Deklan Mau was on his knees. He looked up, and saw Zurf. The Nephran was a pure grotesque, and not just due to his dead black eyes or crustacean claws. He also delighted in doling out the penalties for misbehavior among Ghyff Station. The wet, dull orange tentacles spewing from his maw made the laugh sound painful and mirthless. He swung his heavy claw again and landed a lick on Dek's ear.

Dazed and oppressed by a siren ring in his head, the Kiffar tried to rise, and was met by a heavy boot to his slight belly. He coughed, and with the cough came an equally bitter laugh of his own. "Now hold on one tick," he managed to rasp. "He didn't like the walker foot? Is that what this is about?"

Zurf laughed along with him and smacked him around some more. Dek took the beating and tried to joke in between as much as he could. The punishment was coming either way, he was just glad it had come for him and not for Veeda. It didn't really matter much to him.

This is Ghyff. We work, then we die. None of this really matters.

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