#unknown planet

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—

My comm link buzzes, waking me up. I paw at my pillow, trying to find the comm link without opening my eyes. Found it. “I’m up, I’m up,” I say, not even convincing myself.

“We’ve dropped out of hyperspace -- thought you’d like to know we’re here,” Carth says.

“Yeah…” It takes me a second to realize what he said. “Yes! I’ll be right there!” I look on the floor for my boots before feeling them on my feet. Guess I really passed out. I stand and pull my hair tie out as I walk out of the starboard quarters, combing my hair with my fingers before tying it back up. Messy hair is not a new thing for me, but I don’t even have to see my reflection to know that I have some serious bed head. I also don’t need Mission’s stifled giggles to know that. I can feel it.

I step into the cockpit, and Carth briefly turns away from the controls to acknowledge me before focusing again on the controls. He slowly turns the ship, bringing the system into view. The planet is beautiful and blue, a large ocean dotted with large and small islands on the sunlit side. I can’t see any hint of larger continents. It’s a little hard to believe that a planet like this was the source of a massive empire - which it would have to be given the apparent extent of its reach. Where did the resources come from? Mining resources from the ocean is difficult, and perhaps they could make use of the Selkath - I remember the Guardian droid on Dantooine saying the Builders “employed” Selkath slaves - but they’d have to get to Manaan first. Maybe the ocean is a result of thousands of years of erosion, continental drift, and change, after the fall of the empire. I’d love to take a scout team down there and check it out. The ship continues to turn, and a massive space station comes into view. It looks like three great blades surrounding a sphere. Even from this distance, I can feel the Dark Side radiating off the Star Forge. I remember the first time I saw it. I remember feeling relieved that Malak and I had finally found it. And I remember landing on the planet’s surface. But I don’t remember why. I gently shake the thought away.

“The Star Forge…” Carth says softly, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You transmitted the coordinates to the Republic?” I ask. 

“Yeah, Admiral Dodonna and I spoke the other day, “he says, “Now we just have to wait for the Republic to show up. “We should be safe here - we're outside their sensor range.” Guess we won’t be checking out the planet, then. Probably a good idea - if we checked it out, it would be hard to pull me away. Even the idea of seeing the ecology and environment on a planet that used to be home to an empire is extremely tantalizing. We should stay here in high orbit, so we’re still here when the Republic gets here.

A proximity alert goes off. “A small vanguard of Sith fighters, coming in hard! Take the second position!” I take the chair, despite any protests I could voice about my lack of piloting skills. “Mission!” he shouts, “Get on the turret! Take those fighters out before they report our position to the main fleet!” She shouts an acknowledgement as she runs for the turret and starts firing. “Rena, I need you to monitor our sensor output - keep an eye on their status and ours.”

“Now that I can do!” I know sensor displays like the back of my hand. “The forward shields are taking a hit already - rerouting power to reinforce them. Try to keep them behind us - I reinforced the aft shielding yesterday.”

“Acknowledged.”

I remember. 

God, Rena - Revan, I don’t care - this is not the time for this! Not that I have a choice. The Sith fighters have a red stripe on the underside. That means they’re a particular class of fighter - but what does it mean? The engines --

“Mission, concentrate your fire on the right-hand side of the fighters,” I say over the comm, “There’s a critical component there - a few good hits will take them out.”

“Got it!”

Carth glances at me. “New memory?”

“I don’t want to think about it,” I say quickly. Not like not thinking about it is going to change anything. Revan is going to have a lot to tell me here already. I will listen to her, but I don’t have to let her live in my head, do I? I’ll take her wisdom. But it will be me in charge here.

Mission gets off several good shots, taking out three of the ships as we scrape the atmosphere of the planet. A system failure crops up on my display. The synthesizer. Not a critical system, we can afford to ignore it for now. I feel another ship explode, the shockwave knocking us into the atmosphere again. My sensor field flickers and goes out. “Sensors are dead!”

“What?!” Carth exclaims, trying to get us out of the atmosphere.

“Let me check secondary,” I say, rerouting the feed. The secondary sensors are still partially online. I get a few intermittent readings, not enough to tell me anything. But what I see… is familiar.

I remember why we landed.

“Get away from the planet!” I shout, trying to get ahead of the system failures. If I can keep the engines and thrusters online, maybe we can just get out of this in one piece.

“What’s the--” he starts, but then he sees what I see. Gets the readings I’m getting. Power levels in the red. He tries to keep up as we fall further into the atmosphere, but doesn’t have any more luck than I do. “We’ve got problems!” he shouts so the rest of the ship can hear, “We've flown into some kind of disruptor field. All my instruments are jammed! We've got massive overloads in all systems!”

I look out the viewport, practically pleading with Revan for another nugget of memory. “See that big island?” I say, and Carth looks, “See if you can get us down there.”

“What’s there?”

“That’s where Malak and I crashed last time.” I remember. Carth has something to say about this, wants to know more about the memory, but it’s not the time and he knows it.

He angles the nose of the Hawk for the big island. “Hold on,” he calls out, “This may be a rough landing!”

“Rerouting everything I’ve got to the heat shields,” I say as we descend through the atmosphere, “We’re gonna need it if we want to keep the hull plating.” I can see the heat build up on the edges of the viewport. I vividly remember it doing the same on the small ship Malak and I brought here. Hearing our hull plating fly off as we fell through the atmosphere. The impact with the atmosphere knocked Malak out and away from the pilot controls. Leaving Revan - me - to pilot. And I wasn’t any better at it then than I am now. I knew enough to get us in one piece down to the island and not in the water. It wasn’t smooth at all, not that smooth is ever a word used to describe a crash landing. But even then, Carth is doing a hell of a lot better than I did. He manages to lower the landing struts and set us down on them - Malak and I got stuck with our nose in the sand.

He holds his hand out to help me stand up. I didn’t think I’d need it, but the crash sort of jellied my legs. He must have a sense of that when I put more weight on him than I meant to, because he chuckles a little. “Crash landings get easier the more you go through them, unfortunately,” he says.

“Maybe you’re not as good a pilot as I thought,” I joke.

“And maybe I should just let you hit the ground,” he jokes back. He and I walk into the main hold, where everyone else has gathered.

“Whew!” Mission exclaims, coming in from the turret, “Talk about your rough landings, Carth! What's the matter? You're flying like you've been on an all night Tarisian ale drinking binge!”

“That disruptor field fried our stabilizers,” Carth tells her and the others, “We're lucky we made it down in one piece! But if we can't find the salvage to make repairs I won't even be able to get the Ebon Hawk airborne again!”

“Maybe if we're lucky the crash will take care of our gizka problem,” Zaalbar says, “The rough landing might convince them to abandon the ship.” Aww, I’m gonna miss those little frogs.

“During our rather rapid descent,” Juhani says, “I noticed the hulls of many crashed ships scattered across the landscape. Perhaps the parts yo”u need can be found among their wreckage.”

“The Cathar's right,” Canderous says, “This planet's a technological graveyard. I saw dozens of downed ships out there. That disruptor field must have wiped them all out.”

“Even if we get the stabilizers fixed, we'll have to find and disable the source of that disruptor field before we can take off. Otherwise we'll just end up crashing again,” Carth says.

They all turn to me. All looking at me. “Why are you all looking at me?”

“You were here once before,” Canderous says.

“Do you remember anything about the field?” Carth asks, “You seemed to remember something before we crashed.”

He’s not wrong, but it’s not exactly a voluntary thing. I take a minute to think. To try to remember. I remember the crash. I remember our systems going down. “I know the source is on the planet, rather than the Star Forge. And I remember Malaka and I crashed on this island and turned it off.” Remember, remember… “Once we understood it better, we reactivated it and configured our vessels to resist the effects.”

“But the Republic fleet won't be able to,” Carth realizes, “If we don’t find a way to disable the field the Republic will be slaughtered!”

T3 beeps and rolls away from a sensor console, having managed to repair it. Mission’s standing closest to the console, so she reads off the display. “T3 picked up massive power fluctuations on the ship's sensors. They seem to be coming from some type of large stone structure to the east… it looks like some kind of ancient temple.”

“I can’t say it sounds familiar,” I say, “but it’s a good place to start. If an ancient temple is putting out that much power it probably has something to do with that disruptor field.”

“Don't forget about Bastila, guys!” Mission chimes, “We still have to rescue her, too!”

“I only hope we're not too late,” Juhani says, and Canderous bristles. “Bastila has been Malak's prisoner for a long time. If he can turn her to the dark side she will join him and the Sith will be invincible.”

“She wouldn’t turn,” Canderous says with certainty.

“I tend to agree,” I say.

Jolee shakes his head sadly. “I fear Bastila will find the lure of the Dark Side difficult to resist,” he says, “She is strong in the Force, but she is also impulsive, willful and proud - as you once were, Revan.”

It’s my turn to bristle. “Please don’t call me that, that’s not who I am.”

Jolee smiles softly. “I’m glad to hear you say that. Now that you know your true identity I was afraid you might slip back over to the Dark Side,” he says, “If Bastila feels as you do there may yet be hope for her.”

Carth is focused on the matter at hand, otherwise he would have reached out to me. “Well,” he says, “if Bastila is on the Star Forge like you think, Jolee, then we can't rescue her until we disable that disruptor field. The sooner we investigate that temple to the east the better. We can probably find the wreckage of a downed ship along the way. If we're lucky we can salvage some stabilizers from it to get off this planet.”

“I hope everything works out as smooth as you make it sound, Carth,” Mission says.