20230603 Crimson Rescue, part 1

In our mission to rescue the surviving Crimson Knights, Almon, Chaplain Vanya, Davish, and myself in the Night Sparrow, came out of hyperspace near Yonbiss, seeing a brief pause in hostilities between two space forces.
 
Orbiting the outer moon of Yonbiss is the Eternal Sith Empire, with its strange dark and pointy ships.
 
Orbiting the inner moon is the Eborean Collective, who mostly look like Mon Calamari Quantans, with their somewhat familiar Eborean star fighters.
 
Only a few small dogfights were happening at the moment, but both forces were attempting to shoot escape pods, allowing no survivors from the other side.
 
Our Jedi, of course, took exception to that practice, so I whipped up a "throw your voice" radio signal to mimic an Awakeen warrior transforming into his battle form on one of the many floating pieces of space debris to serve as a distraction, while we recovered two escape pods into the Night Sparrow cargo bay. With luck, it turned out to be one from each side.
 
Vanya cleansed the Eborean of the mind-control parasite which it later claimed had been with it since childhood. The bacta supply in the pod did a fine job of healing its injuries from its ship exploding in the combat. He(?) named himself Minsa Sol.
 
Meanwhile, the distraction was bombarded by torpedos from both sides of the combat, who only turned back on each other after totally disintegrating the decoy.
 
The rescued Sith, a pale-skinned humanoid with many cybernetic replacements, was a grunt-level thug, if I must say so. Though Vanya complemented him and offered to teach him how to fight the puppetmaster parasites that were in control of his known enemy, but he did not trust any information coming out of the mouth of a Jedi, so I programmed a tracking signal into his escape pod and we let him leave for the planet's surface.
 
On our way to the planet's surface, I noticed a distress beacon, which, as Davish noted, was on the High Vor frequencies, coming from a Gurtoch-720 "Turtle" light freighter, the "Nova Horizon". I deduced that it was related to the family Vorcadria, possibly related to Su Vorbocioni / Coon Lakia.
 
The Nova Horizon had taken a good deal of structural damage in the crash into the reinforced walls of the fuel depot and the resulting fuel explosion, but the safety walls did shield it from enough of the blast to allow some of the crew to survive.
 
A single damaged helmet lying on the ground outside a breached hatch told a story of the moments following the crash. The helmet's coloring and insignias were the grey and gold of the Ravenguard, working for Sargon, whom Vanya might identify as Sargon the Irritating, which appeared to be from a boarding party breaching the ship after it crashed. and the round scorched lightsaber hole in the forehead of the helmet indicated the occupants defending their freighter included at least one Jedi, Crimson Knight, or Vor Sabre-rake
 
I decided this area should not go uninvestigated.
 
I sent our B-21 Exploration droid to attempt to recover any surviving data from the 720. It's video feed showed many discarded bits of Crimson Knight armor damaged by blaster fire, and, interestingly, some blaster damage that appeared to be deflected back toward the boarding party, as I have seen the Jedi do on occassion when they disapprove of the direction a blaster bolt is headed.
 
Soon, B-21 reached the bridge and accessed bits of the Captain's Logs. Captain Levor Bonteld typed in Galactic Common a little about the special cargo and how he and the Knights and local guardsmen were going to take it to Vok City. His last line in the Captain's Log was a shift cipher, "Ekva cpeguvqtu pqy mggr vjg Mjcujawp uchg", which I noticed if one shifted each letter twice to the left, translated to, "City ancestors now keep the Khashyun safe".
 
Among B-21's other finds were an oversufficiency of whole-wheat Tw'ingkey snacks and pieces of droids which had not been spared in the firefight. But his most interesting find was inside an expensive crate in a smuggler holdout compartment bearing a marking hastily written on the inner wall, "That which was broken must not be reforged." which, though now largely empty, appeared to have held a very ancient sword. A small sliver of metal presumably fallen off of the blade appeared to be made of a metal similar to Beskar, the best known armor plating. Perhaps that (and maybe its owner) was the Captain's "special cargo." The droid cataloged the sliver by the book.
 
Now in full-on archaeology mode, I set B-21 on the task of touchless reconstructing a couple of skeletal remains which appeared to be of workers in the fuel depot.
 
A tall skinny cyclopean one with 3 digits on each hand appeared to be what Mentat anthropological records called the Abyssin race. Another was quite blocky and similar to an anthropomorphic Corellian hippopotamus.
 
Before B-21 could return to the Night Sparrow, two shark-like tie fighter variations fired upon - not us, but our area. Their insistent radio broadcasts indicated that they, Ravenguards, were intent on capturing or destroying, (preferably the latter,) an old old troop transport carrying what they considered "saboteurs", who sounded like my kind of people.
 
I immediately hacked into their ship systems as they landed near us (It's almost a knee-jerk reaction to me.) in a crash crater significantly smaller than what the Nova Horizon had produced, (which was a low bar to overleap), followed by a soft landing by each of the hostile tie fighters. The crew complement was one human Crimson Knight named Brak Topin, two Abyssins, and two Youngdinni, in blue-grey uniforms, and all strangers to me, but familiar to the old troop transport.
 
Over the battered ship's audio system, I invited them to join us aboard the Night Sparrow if they wanted to continue their travel plans, and I asked B-21 to accompany them to make sure they made the short walk safely as I used the failing ship's weapons and shields to kick up enough sand and dust to conceal their evacuation.
 
They all, even B-21, complied, and the plan went swimmingly, with Vanya having a short discussion with the two hostile tie fighter pilots about their particular life choices that brought them to this point.
 
When the refugees arrived, before proper introductions, I asked their "leader", the Lieutenant, to record a proper send-off message to send to the tie fighter pilots. This he did, so then I had the beleaguered troop transport with its quickly failing engines blare that message on external speakers and unencrypted radio broadcast as it took off, chased by all the reinforcements at the disposal of the two tie fighter pilots.
 
The pilots appeared to want to pursue and give more information to the reinforcements, perhaps about our presence, but Vanya happened to them.
 
As an assist, I aimed the Night Sparrow's sensor array at the tie fighters and issued a broad-spectrum sensor ping at maximum volume, carefully excluding frequencies used by Vanya's and my communication headpieces. After that, between the overpowered sensor ping and Vanya's light sabers, the tie fighters had no functional communication equipment. Plus someone on the Night Sparrow used its weapons to remove the solar power generating flight stabilizers from both little ships.
 
I had no idea until Vanya mentioned it later over a warm caffeinated beverage that both of the fighter pilots ascribed to a philosophy of never letting an enemy, (nor an ally, I presume,) see one's face unhelmeted, (thus out of uniform). So, when the two of them ripped off their helmets in pain and disgust at the admittedly off tune sensor ping blaring in their ears, they committed a social faux pas which would likely leave them as pariahs, outcast by their coworkers in the Ravenguard. perhaps they will rethink their life choices soon. People often do that after talking with Jedi; it's a sort of an unconscious knee-jerk reaction I suppose.
 
At that point, Davish had the Night Sparrow's engines running and we had all our refugees safely on board, so we took off into the air, and the Jedi jumped onboard, (in that order).
 
Once we had manufactured a bit of time to sit down over a few cups of warm beverages, the refugees of the troop transport discussed the global situation with us at length.
 
The two forces warring above us had picked this planet apparently at random to duel it out. The winner of this duel will wrest control of an ancient warship called the Sun Spear, which, the story goes, is armor plated with Beskar, making it nigh invulnerable to most conventional weapons. Plus, it is said to carry a weapon capable of igniting or boiling the atmosphere of a planet, ship, or station. Its only liability is that the ancient spaceship lacks the key to activate any of its systems, luckily for those of us who do not own such a ship and require atmosphere to speak.
 
Also, both Sargon and the Sith appear to want to recover the ancient sword whose empty case B-21 discovered. Discussions and analysis of the sliver revealed it to be The Sword of Khashyun, a Sith artifact.
 
It would seem statistically likely that the sword IS the key to the terror ship, or else there are an abnormally high number of ancient dangerous artifacts in this area. I suspect the former.