105 Chapter 95
"it's a bit anticlimactic, isn't?" Shae said from beside Renn as the two of them stared at the wreck of an ancient old republic era hammerhead class cruiser that had crashed into the dune sea thousands of years earlier.
The ship was almost entirely buried beneath the Tatooine sands and only part of its great wedge-shaped front section visible.
"Yeah…. I was hoping it to be way spookier." Renn agreed before trudging forwards through the sand towards the shipwreck.
After agreeing to fix the tusken raiders haunted ship problem he and Shae had travelled into the desert while Opal and Seela had stayed behind with Dia, who was very indignant about not getting to investigate a haunted shipwreck.
The two of them had hired speeder bikes and followed two tusken raiders to the wreck but their guides had refused to go anywhere near the ancient ship and had left as soon as they had showed Renn and Shae where it was.
"It looks like there's an access hatch up there," Shae pointed up to the top of the exposed part of the ship and the two of them moved cautiously towards it.
They were both fully armed and armoured, just in case the ghosts, or whatever it was haunting the ship, were unfriendly.
And while a blaster might not do much against a spectral apparition, it couldn't hurt to have enough firepower to level a small building with them, just in case.
The access hatch allowed them to drop down into what Sapphire had been able to identify as the ships bridge from schematics she had loaded in her memory banks.
"Main power seems to have failed long ago, but I guess that isn't much of a surprise given how old this rust bucket is," Sapphire grumbled from inside Renn's helmet.
"But there seems to be a small source of auxiliary power still active in one of the cargo bays. But the ships systems are too degraded for me to find out anything else," She continued to try and examine the ships systems for clues but ended up with nothing to show for it.
Renn had moved to one of the bridge consoles when they had entered the ship to give Sapphire access to the central computer, but now he turned to join Shae in exploring the darkened bridge.
Shae was stood still staring at the bulkheads around a closed door, that she had illuminated with lamp mounted to the side of her helmet.
"Well, that's not creepy at all is it?" Renn muttered as he joined Shae in staring at the bulkheads.
An intricate pattern had been calved and burned around the door. Some parts of the pattern had been calved, scratched into the metal bulkheads with jagged pieces of scrap metal, while other bits looked like they had been welded into it with a cutting torch.
The pattern reached away from the door and out across the bridge and looked like two skeletal hands reaching out for some grim unknown purpose.
It was made of thousands of different interlocking words. Words that Renn's identified as the same phrase repeated over and over again, and in every known galactic language.
"Death awaits…" Renn read the repeated phrase slowly and despite the deserts heat and his armours insulation almost felt a cold chill go down his spine.
"Yeah… Spooooky, lets investigate," Shae said with a small chuckle, and they pried the doors open and began silently moving down the corridor behind it.
They hadn't been walking for long when Renn held out a hand to stop Shae.
Three corpses were lying scattered close together ahead of them, and unlike the bodies of the ship's crew that had long ago been reduced to dust by the ravages of time these three seemed quite fresh.
The first was a tusken raider, and a massive hole seemed to have been ripped through his chest and his robes were covered in the remains of dried blood.
The other two bodies seemed to belong to scavengers, probably here to loot anything valuable from the wreck, and they looked to have met the same grisly end as the Tusken raider.
"Trip wire," Renn said pointing to a thin metal wire hidden among the bodies that stretched across the corridor.
His helmets target analysis system traced the wire and showed him that it was connected to a crude spike trap that had been built into the corridors ceiling.
It also showed that similar traps were built into the walls, ceiling, and floor of the entire length of the corridor at random intervals.
"We should only use night vision and our armours infrared optics to see from this point on. I'm pretty sure whatever is leaving these traps isn't a ghost and I think it'll be better if we sneak up on whatever it is," Renn relayed quietly to Shae over their helmet-to-helmet commlink and the two of them crept further down the corridor.
They moved in silence through the pitch-black corridor. Renn's helmet had the ability to amplify even the lowest levels of ambient light allowing him to see in the dark as well as if it was midday, and of course he had given similar tech to his favourite Mandalorian, allowing her to see just as well as he could.
"Wait a moment," Sapphire said in Renn's ear, and he stopped to see another mural carved into one of the corridors walls.
This new mural was different. It stretched down the remainder of the corridor and seemed to be a record of the ships final battle.
It showed a republic fleet and a fleet belonging to the sith empire fighting among the stars.
But it also seemed to show that the sith had stolen something, or someone, and were holding it abord their flagship.
And whatever, or whoever, it was they seemed to believe it held a great power and they were desperate to keep the republic from getting a hold of it.
Then the mural showed a small ship appear in the centre of the battle and head straight for the sith flagship.
But then the story ended as they had arrived at another set of doors, that according to Sapphire's schematic led to the cargo bay that still had some small remnants of power left.
"I think I know what battle the mural is depicting," Sapphire muttered slowly, and her avatar appeared on Renn's armoured shoulder.
"Really?" Renn asked and turned to look curiously at her.
"Yeah… I'm almost certain." She said before pointing towards the image of the small ship, "See that ship, it matches one in my records.
And if it's the same ship then it belonged to one of your ancestors which would make sense as the rest of the mural matches a battle he fought almost exactly." Sapphire told Renn.
"What happened?" Shae asked as she stood beside Renn to stare at the mural.
"A long time ago, during one of the many wars between the republic and the sith, the leader of house Dredd's daughter had left Aruum to explore the galaxy a bit when she was captured by a sith lord and his minions.
When the lord of house Dredd discovered what had happened, he went to rescue her, but by the time he caught up with the sith lord he had joined up with a sith fleet which was battling it out with the republic.
But your ancestor didn't care about being vastly outnumbered, he just cared about rescuing his daughter, and so he attacked them by himself.
In the end he rescued his daughter and destroyed the entire sith fleet, and a large portion of the republic fleet.
This ship must have been one of the republic ships involved in the battle. It's crew probably tried to escape by preforming an emergency jump to hyperspace, but then they ended up crashing here." Sapphire told them.
Renn traced a gloved finger over the mural and metal flakes fell away from the carved lines, "Whoever carved all this must have gotten the information from the ships computer, and they're probably the same person who set all those traps in the corridor."
"Yeah… but what's the point of all this… it doesn't feel very ghosty," Shae muttered and Renn just shrugged.
"We'll probably figure out when we go through that door, we better be ready." Renn said and they raised their weapons and approached the door.
The two of them burst through the door to find a dark and empty cargo bay.
A few crates littered the ground, and a cargo container was resting against one of the far bulkheads.
The motion sensor in Renn's helmet didn't register any movement and the scan for life forms that Sapphire preformed also came back with nothing.
Renn and Shae moved deeper into the cargo bay, searching for any signs of life. Or the ghosts that the tuskens claimed inhabited the ship.
"The power source is coming from just behind that container," Sapphire said highlighting the cargo container in Renn's HUD.
Renn and Shae started towards the container but spun around in alarm when they heard a clattering behind them.
There was a brief ping on Renn's motion tracker but then it vanished again.
They raised their weapons but there was nothing there. Just the darkness and the same abandoned containers they had seen when they entered the cargo bay, although something seemed different about them.
"Saph, have they…?" Renn asked softly and Sapphire responded immediately.
"Yeah… those crates have definitely moved since you entered the room." Sapphire muttered.
He was about to move towards them when there was another blip on his motion tracker from one of the walkways above the cargo bay's deck.
Renn spun, his slug thrower raised, but again nothing was there.
Then all of a sudden, a chorus of bangs sounded from all around them and Renn's motion detector exploded with alerts.
One side of the cargo container fell forwards and slammed into the ground, and a cloud of dust was kicked up into the air, reducing Renn and Shae's visibility.
The sounds of banging increased and figures could be seen shuffling through the dust to surround them.
Renn and Shae moved back-to-back and levelled tracked their weapons back and forth but held their fire.
So far, the mysterious figures hadn't done anything except act really creepy, but that didn't mean they wouldn't do something.
Almost as quickly as it started the banging stopped and a silence descended on the cargo bay.
The dust was still thick in the air, but Renn and Shae could see a massive figure rise up through the haze.
The figure was over four meters in hight and seemed to be wearing a long flowing cloak. It's body though was oddly proportioned, in a way that didn't match any galactic species that Renn had ever seen before.
A squeaky high-pitched laugh sounded from the figure which caused Renn and Shae to raise an eyebrow in confusion as the sound didn't match the menacing shadow.
The laughter started to sound from all around them, and as the dust began to settle Renn realised that the figures who had surrounded them were actually droids.
Droids of all varieties ringed the cargo bay, protocol droids, astromechs, labour droids, battle droids, all stood their joining in the laughter of their cloaked leader.
The huge figure then flicked back its cloak to reveal that it wasn't actually one figure.
Instead, a black painted DUM-series pit droid was wearing the cloak while it balanced precariously on the head of a large binary loadlifter.
"Puny organics!" The pit droid shouted, it was clearly trying to sound commanding but instead it came out as a high-pitched squawk.
"You have entered the domain of the harbinger of Doom, lord of death and misery, high priest of annihilation.
Rejoice as your skill in overcoming the holy trails has proven you worthy to be sacrificed to the great destroyer, the mighty ender of life and un-life.
We the children of annihilation will rescue you from your mortal shells and purify you with holy death.
You will be…" The loud little droid trailed off as it finally looked down and properly studied Renn and Shae.
"Hey! That guy looks like the drawing in the prophecy, doesn't he?" another small droid, an AZ series surgical droid, said happily as it floated up next to the pit droid.
"I-It's h-him! The great destroyer! He has descended from on high to lead us to glorious annihilation!" The pit droid screamed in blissful excitement and the droids in the cargo bay erupted into joyful cheers.
