Working .. Working .. Complying" IG-100-009 eventually agreed. It's clambering to it's feet lacked the fluid grace the synthetic Jedi-killers had all possessed previously, but I wasn't looking for a sparring partner.
I just needed those strong, strong arms, and that untiring back to move stone as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
...
Yaddle was long gone by now. Leading me to wonder how the mission was going. I was acutely conscious of the fact that an Asajj Ventress capable of Dark Side illusions could still be down here, somewhere.
Not to mention my having just learned my new droid had apparently been commissioned as part of a nine-droid set. The idea that there might be six more of these nightmares on-planet was, unsettling, to say the least. Especially now that I was operating on my own.
Now that IG-100-009 was trundling toward the collapsed tunnel, I returned Slicer-R1 to it's secure place in my pack. The droid was far too fragile to leave laying about, and I needed to focus on keeping it's handiwork on-task.
Impressed, I watched the two meter-plus droid shift and rid itself of duracrete chunks with impressive speed.
It took more than three minutes of observation before I realized what I'd initially taken for harmless tiny errors in it's movements were actually pauses the droid was taking to study it's results to date.
I hadn't realized the machine had retained this much problem-solving power in it's present stripped down, ultra-basic computing condition, but the droid was actually shifting stone where it could to brace against further collapse.
It didn't always work, and it ran counter to the possibility of clearing the collapse completely, but I swiftly came to understand the droid's approach was the only one with any chance of success. The best I could possibly hope for would be a briefly maintained opening in the collapse.
One I could pull Bultar through by whatever means possible, and stuff the risk of my getting squashed flat.
I wasn't thrilled about the possibility of being crushed to death, but it didn't require any second thoughts for me to know Tutso wouldn't hesitate to risk getting squished. Not if it was him here, and my lady-love desperately in need of his help.
"If I'm not the kind of man whose friends can count on him, then I am not the Jedi to stop Palpatine and his crew."
While I breathed, felt my fear, then released it into the Force as I watched that narrow tunnel-within-a-tunnel slowly being carved out by my relentlessly repurposed droid, I realized this was a principle which applied to everything big and small.
I was either the master of my fear whenever I needed to step up and do what I believed to be right, or Palpatine and his ilk had already won as far as I was concerned.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of Evil, is that good men should do nothing." I'd always believed in these sage words, and never had a problem living by them in my first life.
Why then, when I was so much more talented and powerful in this life, could it sometimes seem like my dreads were fifteen feet high and insurmountable?
"Maybe it's precisely because you're so much more powerful and talented, this time around? It feels like more to lose, eh?" The thought flitted across my mind, then refused to leave as I recognized the truth inherent to it.
Shaking my head to clear it of errant tangents, I saw the droid had fashioned a sort of funnel through the collapse. It was leaning forward up to it's shoulders in the stone to brace it's work, and I could tell now was as good as it was going to get.
A burst of Force Speed in conjunction with Force Sense let me rip off Palpatine's "It's treason, then" corkscrew. Shooting through the gap, and as the Force trilled a spiky warning at me I drew my legs up as fast as I could while falling forward.
My ribs ground painfully against the uneven pile of duracrete I landed on, as the breath was blasted from my lungs by the stone I came to rest atop. Yet looking back, I realized I'd been wise to heed the Force at the cost of some pain.
The tunnel had collapsed as I'd shot through. Nearly crushing both my legs from the knees down in the process. Only my drawing them up at the cost of lost aerodynamics mid-corkscrew had prevented my getting a good start on ending up as much machine as Vader had.
The dismembered dead bodies of Tynnan soldiers lay everywhere. Some of the hapless aliens had been bludgeoned, crushes, or ripped apart by what were clearly some very Dark applications of TK.
While others had been beaten to a pulp and violated with the excessive mechanical strength of the Magna-Guards. More than half had simply been taken completely apart with lightsabers.
There were so very many severed limbs, spilled and splattered gore, and crushed chunks of viscera that it took me a few moments to realize there were considerably more corpses than the eight-Tynnan patrol which had accompanied Knights Swan and Tassu.
From the looks of the literally blood-coated corridor, there were enough bodies to account for two separate eight-soldier squads.
Obviously, doomed reinforcements which had come to the aid of their fellow before the communications jamming began. Only to pay for their valor by dying to the last in a hopeless cause.
Well, as I moved among the bodies and searched, I amended that initial assessment. Knight Tassu lay propped against the wall with a blackened hole through his right lung, and two more lightsaber-thrusts through both sides of his abdomen.
Beneath a section of ceiling he'd obviously brought down himself lay a pair of mostly pulverized Magna-Guards.
The sheer amount of stone he'd torn free and dropped on them was incredibly impressive for a Jedi I happened to know was among the weakest in the Force to pass the Trials in a generation.
When I finally spotted Bultar lying a bit further up the hallway and laid out straight with Nacanas's one good hand still on the one-armed Jedi Knight's leg just above a deep slash burned from the knee nearly to the right hip by a lightsaber, I realized it had been Knight Tassu's last offensive gasp.
Having already fallen, with the ceiling coming down and an undoubtedly great amount of stone dust swirling about them, Nacanas had succeeded in creating the illusion that Knight Swan was already dead.
Looking at the terribly injured woman, I realized there was no way she could have managed the unbroken concentration on her own to put herself this deeply into healing-trance. Yaddle had been right, of course.
Unable to save himself with most of his organs cooked by sustained contact with penetrating lightsabers, Nacanas Tassu had somehow managed something akin to a Force Meld with his critically injured partner. Helping her find trance, and stabilizing it at a deep enough level it would both sustain her and give her the appearance of death to anyone not paying a great deal of attention.
The still-groaning, unstable nature of the ceiling likely would have been reason enough for the Dark Siders to move along.
I scooped up the lightsabers of both Jedi, then took both of the bacta-patches which were the last items in my pack except for a pair of medical stims and my grapnel projector/retractor and got to work.
Placing one patch in such a way it drew together the slash up her leg, and wrapping the other over the stump of her (thankfully) non-dominant right arm below the elbow. Cinching it in place with the accompanying band. Finally, I found a vein in her good arm, then injected Swan with one of my medical stims.
Designed to temporarily strengthen a patient and stave off shock during transport, it put me on the clock because the adrenaline-like chemicals in the stim might well disrupt her healing-trance.
I did not like Bultar's odds if that broke while we were away from Yaddle, or my Master, in a pinch.
Hefting her as carefully as I could in both arms, I had to wait impatiently for IG-100-009 to finish tunneling to us once more. Once I saw proverbial daylight, I had no choice except doing my best to float Bultar through the gap with TK. If I tried to push and shove her through over the broken and irregular rocks, I might as well take my own lightsaber to her.
It was a nerve-wracking experience, but by the grace of the Force, nothing fell on the comatose Jedi as I floated her unsteadily through the narrower-than-last-time tunnel.
I had to expose myself to the peril of being squished without a chance to react once more. Crawling far enough into the unsteady tunnel I could see to navigate Bultar to clear ground, then set her down without killing her.
The groan of the rock was my only warning. I didn't think, I ramped my Force-augmentation to maximum-stupid and kicked off from where I was half-in/half-out. Using something akin to a bastardized Force Leap, I screamed as the stone gouged right through the side of my boot and scraped most of the skin off the ball of the inside of my right ankle.
Feeling the bone trying to break, as my temporarily increased sturdiness via the Force compromised with a hundred pounds of stone to leave me with a bad sprain as I flopped out of the hole. Somehow, by the grace of the Ashla, nothing was crushed, crippled, or splattered.
Despite my badly sprained ankle and need to carry out a forced-march while carrying a five foot ten, one hundred fifty pound human female, I had an ace in the hole. If there was one single Force-technique I had absolutely mastered beyond any possibility of improvement, it was Control Pain.
I knew I was doing my ankle no favors, but with the Force as my ally I marched back through the tunnel we'd entered by. Checking my wrist-unit every fifteen or twenty paces for signs the comm-jamming had ended.
In my arms, Bultar had begun to stir. Meaning I was just about out of time, so I gritted my teeth and started to run. Either I'd find Yaddle, or the pathway back to the lift and Dark Woman.
I didn't really care either way, but I'd be damned if Bultar was going to die on me after all that!
...
Hey guys can you throw some power stones to Elevate the ranking.
=========================
if you want to read ahead of the public release you can go to p@treon :
p@treon.com/Rage_moon