This chapter contains, spoilers: melting, disintegration, bone breaking, falling, decap, necro, nullification

Chapter 6: Loose Ends

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Diffused through the perpetual mugginess of Raxus Prime, the sun did not rise so much as it oozed over the horizon, orange light pouring slowly into the empty streets like syrup. As the waves of light lapped their way up the door of the “Pach-Up Walk in Clinic & Augment Emproium”, the doors abruptly slid open, and two figures briskly stepped out. One was a woman of unremarkable height, unremarkable build, and unremarkable features, dressed in a clean if well worn bathrobe, cargo pants, and a fashionable pair of ivory white boots a size too large for her feet. The other was a 6’10” lizard with a bionic neck brace, wearing what appeared to be four hospital gowns designed for average sized men crudely cut and sewn into a one piece jumpsuit, and a pair of filthy black boots with one sole worn more than the other. Both shared a 1000 yard stare and a posture that screamed… it just screamed.

“Well.” The young woman said, taking a deep pull of filtered air from her mask. “At least-“ A finger was placed firmly but not forcefully against her lips, a sharp black claw poking the underside of her nose.

“Jedha. Shut up.” The lizard said, before removing his finger. Jedha Kraz obeyed, not from fear but a general agreement that anything she could have said would not have been worth the breath. She’d been ‘gifted’ two weeks worth of breaths in filters and oxygen tanks, along with two weeks of food and water, all at an exorbitant cost to her self respect, ability to make eye contact, and soreness in her jaw, hands, knees, feet, and all three holes below her beltline. These breaths were hard bought, and should be spent only on the essentials.

Essentials like “Cabe, where are you going?”

Cabe Zarro stopped, turned, and opened his mouth to yell at her. Only a single, short syllable erupted from his speaker before he froze. Jed had a good point. Where was he going? On instinct, Cabe had started walking home. Only, it wasn’t home any more. Jed’s carelessness and Rodian gangsters had seen to that. If word got around that he wasn’t home when his home became his former home, he was certain that more thorough attempts on his life would be forthcoming. He had to leave Geen-14, at least, and more than likely he’d have to leave Raxus Prime. He had to go… somewhere.

“I’m going to Geen-10.” Cabe answered, walking past Jed and down what passed for the road west. Jed, having no plan of her own and no intention of sticking around the proverbial (or was it literal?) scene of the crime, followed Cabe. “I’m going to salvage along the way, going to buy myself a ticket to the Rax-34 space hub, going to do odd jobs until I can buy a ticket… somewhere else. Then, I’m going somewhere else.”

Jed raised an eyebrow, the peak of which poked out from beneath her goggles. “What about the Jedi?”

“What about them?” Cabe asked, not really asking.

“I mean, aren’t you going to help me on my quest? To find more force sensitives and rebuild the Jedi Order and destroy the Empire and stuff?” Jed clarified.

Cabe stopped, turned to what was functionally his adoptive daughter, and asked “Do you honestly think I care about the Jedi? Or the Empire? Or your quest? All I want is to not die a horrible, horrible death, and you’ve been making that pretty difficult lately. So with all due respect, oh mighty Jedi, I’m going to leave you to your suicide mission while I go off and…” his hand hung in the air, its clawed fingers curled like a question mark as he pointed to the empty horizon.

“What, herd nerfs?” Jed asked, sarcastically.

“Maybe!” Cabe snapped, resuming his westward walk. “Not like we’re in a position to be picky about our work.”

Jed watched the Londarr as he stomped off. On the one hand, she was certainly hurt by what he’d said. She hadn’t been trying to make his life more dangerous, after all. It was just a necessary part of being a Jedi, facing danger and adversity and whatnot. Even if he could never be a Jedi, she at least thought that he could be a hero, and that they could work alongside one another. On the other hand

“We…” Jed said, too quiet for the far off Londarr to hear. She smiled. “He said we.” She whispered. Despite Cabe’s protests and complaints, he still seemed to consider the two of them a team. He wanted her to follow, even if he didn’t sound like it. Even if he didn’t consciously know that he wanted it.

Not wondering for a moment if Cabe had perhaps referred to them as ‘we’ as a force of habit, due to living with Jed for over six years, or if he was saying ‘we’ to suggest that Jed should abandon her aspirations and not the other way around, Jed quickly caught up to him and began walking alongside him.

“I’m serious, Jed, I’m not tagging along to watch you kill yourself.” Cabe said, staring purposefully ahead and not daring to look into the young woman’s big doe eyes. Why did humans have to have such adorable eyes?

“I know.” Jed answered, shrugging casually.

“You… do?” Cabe asked, his stride halting. He would have cocked his head to look at her on instinct, but his new handicaps had saved him from meeting the human’s hypnotically cute gaze. His head only twitched a little in its housing, his metal neck rigid and incapable of turning in place. Great work, Pach.

“Yup.” Jed said, nodding. “The Rodians would kill me too if they found out I’m alive, and I don’t sense any other force sensitives on the planet besides me and Master Kazdan, so I’ve also got to get off Raxus Prime as soon as possible. We’ll raise the money for our flight faster if we scavenge together, since we’ve already got a good team dynamic, so the way I see it it just makes sense for us to stick together, at least until we get off Raxus Prime.”

“And then we go our separate ways, you to go kill yourself and me to herd nerfs?” Cabe asked, his tone not as sarcastic or light as he’d wanted it to be.

“If that’s what you choose to do.” Jed said, a coy smile poking out from the corners of her oxygen mask. She could change his tune between now and then, surely.

Cabe answered her only by groaning and continuing his journey west, not protesting as Jed walked beside him. This stupid girl would be the death of him.





“Nyeta, nyeta! Wabba d’ite’Ja’bo’bi!”

Lerdun Whitt always hated the Jawa language. It always sounded like little more than a senseless mash of squeaky syllables and grating phrases repeated over and over. Learning it was a nightmare, speaking it was an insult to his throat and tongue, and so Lerdun didn’t deign to answer the Jawa in her native tongue. Since the Jawa was a backwards savage who refused to learn Galactic Basic, however, he was forced to respond in broken Rodian “She no Jedi, she lucky whore. See lizard?”

The jawa adjusted her shoulders and hips with subtle movements, yet the view from her rifle’s scope bounced around the landscape with almost dizzying speed. The targets were distant, and her hands were shaking with nerves. An excited gasp, and in equally mangled Rodian she answered “Correct! Searches the ship it.”

“Good. Keep looking at him. Discover where they go.” Lerdun said, one fist clenching with rage as the other drifted mournfully toward the sagging emptiness in the middle of his loose fitting pants. Rubbing the spot, feeling the chafingly rigid fabric against the crudely sutured flesh he had received as punishment for his failure, Lerdun supposed he should be grateful that the mad doctor had returned the lizard’s body. Now, Lerdun would be able to properly repay that thing for his emasculation.

He supposed, in some twisted and backwards sense, he should be grateful for a lot of things right now. That he had happened to be eating breakfast in a restaurant near Pach’s clinic when the girl and lizard had left it. That neither had spotted him. That he had been eating alone, with no other gangsters awake at such an early hour to see the two of them alive and unexploded. That they had immediately left town and were heading in the direction of Geen-10, an Imperial controlled city with minimal if any mafia influence. That Deru, his Jawa colleague just so happened to live on the same side of town they were leaving. The stars seemed to have aligned perfectly for Lerdun Whitt, as if they were trying to repay him for the most horrible week he’d ever had. It was certainly a start.

“Good, girl stop moving!” Deru said, steadying her rifle and centering the scope on the young girl’s head. Curiously, the girl was facing their direction, her head panning as though she was scanning the horizon. As though she could sense that she was being watched, even if she couldn’t locate the source. Deru attempted to center the sights between the girl’s goggled eyes, wanting to completely guarantee a kill. While the plasma bolts her rifle fired didn’t drop by any appreciable degree, they were quite slow projectiles compared to a laser or even lead slugs. It would take well over a second for the bolt to travel from Deru’s rifle into the human’s skull, and she couldn’t risk a potentially non-lethal body shot. If the boss found out that she and Lerdun had lied about killing Tug’s killer, that they chose to bomb her empty apartment specifically so they could lie about the lack of remains, that they had no idea where she’d gone or how to find her… well, it was lucky she would never know. Any second now the girl would be dead, her brains vaporized and the charred remains of her skull and hair scattered across a meter wide ring around her headless, twitching corpse. As soon as she stopped moving, the loose end would be tied off, and Deru could sleep easy. Deru swallowed a foul mouthful of Raxus air, her chest puffing up and her hands steadying. The girl’s head had stopped moving, its goggled eyes unnervingly aimed directly at the base of the severed command bridge that Deru and Lerdun were using as a vantage point. Her finger twitched, the green dot in the center of her scope completely enveloping the left lens of the human’s goggle.

Her finger tightened.

“No!” Lerdun shouted in Basic, grabbing the rifle and pulling the barrel off target.

Deru swore in Jawa, her muscles tensing with surprise and her finger coming micrometers from pulling the trigger and revealing their location without harming the girl. “Your problem?!” She demanded, her breathing resuming in short, panicked gasps.

“We too far! Lizard could escape! Must we get closer to death both.” Ledrun said, releasing the rifle only when he was certain that Deru’s stress driven convulsions rendered shooting impossible. Deru was a mediocre markswoman, and her ability to peg both targets at this range before one of them found cover was uncertain at best. Raxus Prime, especially the wastelands between its cities and foundries, was all but made of cover, the landscape a near monotone expanse of blaster resistant scrap metal that had, over centuries of haphazard disposal and careless discarding of refuse wherever it happened to land, naturally formed itself into an ever shifting mass of canyons, craters, and cave systems. They had no idea what was inside the ship the lizard was exploring, or what was obscured from view behind it. There could be an entire tunnel system just out of sight, allowing the lizard easy escape. They couldn’t risk it.

“Who care about lizard? Girl kill Tug, bosses only care for girl death!” Deru said, bringing the rifle back up and attempting to reacquire her quarry.

“I care.” Lerdun hissed in Basic, grabbing the rifle again and staring daggers into Deru. Wordlessly, Lerdun dropped his trousers and drawers, revealing the poorly stitched together lump of puffy pink flesh that had once been the home of his cock and balls. Pach could’ve fixed him properly, grown him new junk or whipped up some sort of mechanical super-dong, but his bosses wouldn’t allow it. They barely allowed him to have pain killers while Pach was sewing him up. His mutilation, they felt, was fitting punishment for his failure to protect Tug, and they’d explicitly ordered her to perfom the roughest patch job she could manage on poor Lerdun. They said they‘d arrange to have him remasculated once he’d ‘earned the right to call himself a man again’, but Lerdun knew that day would likely never come. They didn’t care about him, they didn’t care about anything that wasn’t Rodian. Slowly, painfully, and piecemeal mangling that lizard’s cock, taking his sweet revenge in all of its glory before killing him, that was all Lerdun had. He couldn’t risk it.

Deru glanced down at the mess of stitches between Lerdun’s legs, her stomach churning as her glowing orange eyes met the unnerving pinprick hole that had been left for his urethra. “I kill lizard, after girl, swear.” She said, bringing the rifle back up.

“NO!” Lerdun barked, holding the rifle firmly as the Jawa struggled to bring it back to the girl. “We watch. We wait. We get close. We kill at right time.”

“No want!” Deru said, along with some incoherent Jawa that was most likely swearing and commands to let go. After seeing what the bosses had done to Lerdun for his failure, Deru would be damned before she let the girl get away, and after seeing what that lizard had done to Lerdun without a massive muscular body covered in spikes and claws, she’d be damned before she got anywhere near it. She’d kill the girl, and do her best to pick off the lizard, but if she couldn’t manage that it was no big deal. Killing it wouldn’t bring Lerdun’s manhood back; bombing the apartment had already proven that much.

Tugging turned to full fledged wresting over the rifle, Lerdun swinging Deru around like a toy and slamming the diminutive creature into walls and the hollowed out shells of control panels. Despite being no more than 3.5 feet tall and weighing no more than 65lbs, Deru’s grip strength was literally inhuman. Even if Lerdun wasn’t straddling the line between a skinny-fat middleweight and a bloated welterweight, and even if he didn’t have his footwork encumbered by the pants around his ankles, he would’ve found it nearly impossible to pry the weapon out of Deru’s warm, alive hands. If he weren’t so pissed off and frantic over the prospect of losing his shot at revenge because of his accomplice’s cowardice, Lerdun might have had time to say a speciesist remark about Jawa sticky fingers. As it was, his vocalizations were limited to grunts, growls, and barking single syllable commands as the two awkwardly stumbled around the bridge.

In a technical sense, Deru won the contest, as she was the one still holding the rifle at the end of their confrontation. Unfortunately for the Jawa, Lerdun had lost his grip at the same time he had been swinging Deru forward, and since forward was the empty frame where the bridge’s windows had once been the Jawa was sent sailing out of the bridge and into an 80ft freefall.

She was eerily silent for the first third of her fall, her mind still trying to make sense of the swirl of blurred colors and the lack of pain as her body failed to hit the ground when she was expecting it to. It wasn’t until Lerdun slid entirely out of her field of vision, disappearing above her as the underside of the bridge eclipsed him, that her mind caught up with reality and the screaming started. It was a high pitched and wordless shriek of terror, a single fearful syllable stretched and distorted as it was pulled across 55 feet, and it was a very unique kind of shriek. It was the kind that can only be produced when a sentient being loses all higher thinking functions in the face of inescapable mortal peril and is overcome by animal impulse, and it was a sound that both witnesses had only heard once before; in the split-second before Tug died. Releasing the rifle that had doomed her, Deru desperately clawed at the empty air, searching for anything that could catch her. Nothing did, and after the longest and shortest seconds of her life had passed, Deru landed.

Deru was conscious of the fact that she had stopped falling, and recognized that if she recognized that she wasn’t falling any more, she must be alive. She looked down, expecting to see a jumble of organs and shattered bones impaled and eviscerated across the jagged heap of rusted metal that passed for the ground, just before fading into the cold abyss of death. What she saw, instead, was somehow much worse than that. Whoever had dumped the severed bridge Deru had just finished falling out of had also dumped the rest of the ship along with it, its pieces in a mangled heap but all accounted for. This included the ship’s large liquid fuel cells, the tops of which had corroded away over the decades and the contents of which Deru was submerged in from the neck down.

“Submerged” may have been a strong word, for the liquid had solidified to a paste consistency over the years. It hadn’t splashed when Deru landed, and when an intense jolt of pain sent her legs flailing beneath the all but opaque yellow surface she realized both of her ankles and her butt had shattered on impact with the paste. That could have been considered getting off light considering the height of her fall, were it not for the agonizing burning sensation nipping at her ankles and wrists. The only parts of her inky black flesh directly exposed to the paste, Deru felt a sharp acidic burn begin chewing its way through her skin, each cell screaming as it boiled away with a sickening hiss and a dull dribbling sound as the gasses were caught and released by the muck in lazy bubbles. Deru could only scream in earnest for a few seconds before the acidic paste ate through the bottom of her veil and lapped across her throat like a burning fist clenching around her throat and choking her. She had to get out and she had to get out now. Her head spun, dragging her throat across the thick acidic paste with all the pain of pulling it across a mandolin, and her shimmering orange eyes caught sight of the fuel cell’s corroded, serrated rim. She half paddled and half waded through the paste, her ankles crying both from within and from outside as the pain of her shattered bones and the pain of her dissolving skin drew closer and closer together, until the two were an indistinguishable mess of anguished nerves scrambling her thoughts.

Hoisting herself over the lip of the fuel cell and spilling herself onto the comparatively less dangerous surface of Raxus Prime, Deru barely noticed the massive gash she’d put in her stomach as she dragged herself out of the acid. The pain was certainly there, it was a deep gash that ran across her entire abdomen, but it was all but lost roaring burn that had now engulfed every inch of flesh below her chin. She dragged herself onto her knees and looked down.

Strings and tatters of fabric slid down her glistening black flesh, her tunic and undergarments coming apart in sopping, sizzling clumps of brown sludge that plopped to the jagged ground and slid through the cracks like fat gooey raindrops. For a few seconds, it looked like the acid had only melted Deru’s clothes and singed raw red bands into her wrists and ankles. Apart from the rashes and the horrible angle her ankles were bent at, and the long diagonal gash across her abdomen threatening to spill her guts, she looked unscathed. While Jawas were very secretive about their biology, something to do with their religion apparently, Deru’s exposed body was all but indistinguishable from a human dwarf’s. Stout arms and legs, small but shapely breasts and butt, thick hips complimented by pronounced vaginal lips with deep red lighting up the area. The only thing that gave away the fact that Deru wasn’t a human dwarf but a Jawa of average height was her skin color, which was an inhumanly deep shade of outer-space black that not even the most melanin rich human would come close to replicating.

Then, that deep black flesh began to blister and pop. Great fissures of red opened as her skin peeled and exploded, accompanied by geysers of blood and thick wisps of smoke. These fissures met and merged as her skin dissolved, until Deru was left a flayed and smoldering mass of muscles and organs like a medical diagram given horrible, if brief, life. She fell to her elbows and knees, the pain of her completely raw and rapidly deteriorating muscles colliding with the jagged scrap ground was incomprehensible yet Deru eerily quiet. The shock of hitting the ground had splayed her loose hanging guts across the ground, and a large piece of her throat had sloughed off and landed in a puddle beneath her unharmed head. Only a gurgle could be heard over the sizzle of melting flesh, the only sign that Deru was unbelievably still alive and very believable wishing that her head had also been submerged. She tried to lift the mess of meat and bone that had once been her hand up to her veil, trying to grab her face and hopefully smear enough of the acidic residue on her head to hasten her end, but it was no use. Her muscles, fraying and snapping and falling to the ground like wads of sodden string, were too weak to move. She could only slump forward and silently weep as her flesh melted away, slipping through the cracks and sinking into the darkest, untouched depths of Raxus Prime.

Searing pain gave way to icy numbness as Deru’s nervous system dissolved with the rest of her clothes, meat, and organs. The sizzling grew fainter as the last of the mush that had once been her body sank beneath her. A soft clattering accompanied the last whispers of the sizzle, her bones coming away from their sockets and falling to the ground below her. While the acid had had no trouble eating through her skin, meat, cartilage, nerves, and sinew, for whatever reason it seemed to have no effect on her bones beyond stripping away the topmost layer of grime, leaving them pearly white and completely clean. Whether this strange effect was due to the composition of the expired and outmoded fuel left to fester in a toxic atmosphere, an oddity of Jawa bones, or a combination of the two, was unknown. All Deru knew was that was that she was, somehow, still alive. Or, rather, she wasn’t quite fully dead yet. While the acid had blistered and seared her neck stump shut, trapping enough oxygenated blood inside her brain to keep her from a mercifully quick death

A shadow was cast over her vision, and one of her slowly fading orange eyes twitched vaguely in its direction out of reflex. It was Lerdun Whitt, a bewildered look on his face as he scanned the roughly Jawa shaped skeleton sprawled out beneath the severed head of his former coworker. He didn’t look the least bit remorseful or sad for what he’d done, only confused by the strange set of coincidences that had brought Deru to such a state. Grabbing the hood and lifting without thinking, Deru’s head snapped free of its empty spinal column and tumbled out of its hood, landing hard on the cold pointy Raxus ground. Lerdun dropped the empty hood and its attached veil in shock, and stared down at the twitching head now lying face up with its unfocused orange eyes staring up at nothing.

While Jawa religion made the species very secretive about their biology, Lerdun had always heard that they were basically overgrown rats beneath their cloaks and veils, squashed noses and patchy black fur and jagged snaggleteeth jutting out at all angles. Why would they hide their appearance if it wasn’t something hideous? What he saw, instead, was a remarkably human looking head slowly twitching its lips like a fish out of water. While its skin was far darker than any human’s could be, its hair was a bright rose red that no human could have without dye, and its eyes glowed orange (though the glow flickered and faded as the head drew closer to its final death), it otherwise looked completely human. It featured chubby cheeks, a wide round nose hanging over narrow pink lips, and a brow ridge that arched high over each glowing eye giving her face a natural surprised expression. It was a cute face, even with its glassy tear filled eyes and uselessly flapping lips. He almost regret doing this to her.

No, he didn’t. She was going to take away his only chance at revenge, the only thing he had. Even if he couldn’t restore his manhood physically, he would at least take it back in spirit. “If you’d just listened, this wouldn’t’ve happened.” Lerdun said, more to himself than his victim. He was speaking Basic, so even if she could still make out words through the encroaching haze of death they wouldn’t have meant anything to her. “If you weren’t such a coward, none of this would’ve happened.” His scowl deepened, his toe of his boot resting on her chin. “If you’d just shot the girl and her little cock chopping friend when Tug died, I’d still be a man and you’d be alive. If you hadn’t run, you wouldn’t have to die.” Yes, this was all her fault. Lerdun had only lost his junk because she lost her spine. It had nothing to do with his inability to draw and fire his own gun. It was all her fault. She deserved this. She deserved more.

Deru’s eyes twitched in Lerdun’s direction, and her lips moved with what seemed to be some conscious agency. Like she were trying to speak. Whether that was true, or merely what Lerdun thought he saw, the human let out an ice cold laugh and leaned in close. “What’s wrong? Think I’m being too hard on you?” He said, wincing as he said ‘hard on’ and realized he couldn’t be hard on anyone any more. “Here, let me make it up to you. Give you something for the road.” Taking a deep breath before he pulled down his mask, Lerdun picked up the surprisingly heavy head of his former associate and brought it to his lips. The Jawa’s eyes briefly flashed at their full intensity as Lerdun’t tongue parted her lips, his teeth gnawing on her face like an animal. Even to the barely conscious head, it was obvious he’d never done this before. Either that, or no woman he’d been with had dared to critique his methods. Deru would’ve bit him in a final act of defiance, show him that she wasn’t a coward, but it was no use. Blood loss and a lack of neck muscles made her too weak to even make a noticeable nip, her jaw only managing a feeble twitch as Lerdun’s overenthusiastic tongue explored her mouth. Deru resigned herself to this forced final kiss, her eyes fading along with the shock and residual fight she had in her. She closed her eyes, and allowed darkness to take her.

Seeing this, Lerdun pulled the head away and pried one eye open. It was a cold and dull amber orb, unresponsive even as he prodded it with his gloved finger. She wasn’t faking it to escape the kiss, she really had died. The head looked oddly peaceful, despite the oddly violent demise of its owner, its eyes shut serenely and its saliva covered lips slightly parted as its slack jaw limply dangled beneath its plump cheeks. “Aw, finished already? I must be better than I thought.” Lerdun coughed, tucking the head under one arm as he pulled his mask back on. “Well I ain’t done yet, so I hope you don’t mind giving me a little something extra.” He hoisted the head back up to eye level. “You don’t mind, do you? You can speak up if you gots a problem, I won’t take offense.”

Of course, the deceased didn’t speak, and so Lerdun did. “Alright then, show daddy some love.” Dropping his drawers, Lerdun pressed the dead woman’s face into the mound of scars and stitches that had been his cock and balls, using his thumbs to part her lips wide around the space that had been his shaft. It hurt like hell, obviously, but Lerdun pretended to enjoy the sensation of her limp lips pressing against his empty groin, loudly moaning and throwing his head back as he rocked Deru’s face up and down on his groin. In a way, he did enjoy it, the power he felt humiliating this dead traitor’s head, rubbing its nose in its mistake like an unbroken pet that had pissed on the carpet. It wasn’t the revenge he was craving, but it scratched the same itch. It was justice, and it was sweet. Pressing his palms into the fat cheeks of the severed head and tilting it down until its deep red tongue lolled out, Lerdan ran the tongue up his stitches where his balls had been, shuddering as he imagined the sensations that could have been. Physical pain and emotional pleasure fought for control of his hands, the former trying to make him pull the head away from his sore loins while the latter wanted him to rough the head up further.

Pain and pleasure eventually settled on a compromise, ending Lerdun’s head session by telling him that he was totally cumming right now. Lerdun pitched back and howled, pressing Deru’s face as firmly as he could against the base of his imaginary cock. Without any actual cum to accompany his psychosomatic release, Lerdun’s urethra unclenched and released a messy spray of piss into the dead woman’s mouth, the foul smelling and alarmingly murky substance rolling down the back of her tongue and dribbling down her abbreviated throat, falling to the ground in more stream-like fashion than it had left Lerdun’s body.

Relieved, Lerdun pulled the head away, drops of urine dripping from its lips as he tilted it forward. “Hope it was as good for you as it was for me.” He said, unceremoniously dropping his toy to the ground. Lerdun picked up Deru’s hood and veil, and used it to wipe down his soiled groin before shoving Deru’s head back into it and shoving the messy, stinking bundle to the bottom of his backpack. Scanning the area, Lerdun found Deru’s rifle, the scope smashed flat and the stock cracked in half but the actual weapon looking completely functional. He unscrewed the scope and secured the weapon to the side of his pack, opposite his filter and oxygen tank. Finally, Lerdun looked around, and spotted the tiny speck of a ship that the girl and lizard had been digging through. While he was far too far to make out either of his targets, he knew that if he hurried over there, he could catch up to them, follow them, and find the right time to strike. And so, Lerdun Whitt hurried.





“So are you actually going to help me or re you just going to stand there staring ominously into the middle distance?” Cabe asked, tossing a small, light piece of worthless circuitry at the back of Jed’s head.

“Someone’s watching us. I can sense it.” Jed said.

Cabe’s stomach turned, and while he enjoyed the sensation of having a stomach again he didn’t care for the turning one bit. “Did you see something? Someone?”

“No.” Jed answered, truthfully. “But I can sense it. The Force tells me someone is watching us.”

“That’s not the Force, that’s called paranoia. People want to kill us, so naturally we’re feeling a little jumpy.” He said, trying to shake off his own fears along with Jed’s. Truthfully, Cabe had also been feeling that sixth sense sensation of being watched ever since they left Geen-14. He’d tried to ignore it, rationalize that if anyone had seen them then they would’ve shot them dead by now, but he couldn’t shake it entirely.

“It’s not that. It’s different. I… I sense it.” Jed said, staring intently at the hacked up remains of a capital ship, far off on the horizon.

“Of course you do.” Cabe said and sighed simultaneously, his mechanical voice and optional breathing completely independent of one another. “Come on then, if we’re being followed then we want to keep moving if we’re gonna lose them.”

“Yeah.” Jed whispered, anxiously gripping the hilt of her lightsaber beneath her robes. Breathing deeply, she turned and followed her friend.