A/N: Sorry couldn't update yesterday as I had fallen asleep early and woke up nearly 5 hours after update schedule. So I thought lets update next day at prime time.
This chapter is a bit on longer side btw
____
[Somewhere in Hyper-Space]
Pshhhhhhh!
A thick layer of chemical foam coated the sparking power relay, temporarily choking out the electrical flames.
I immediately spun around on my heel, aiming the heavy cylinder at another localized fire chewing through the hyperdrive coolant lines.
Pshhhhh!
"Fuck... fuck, fuck, goddammit!"
I dropped the empty extinguisher, letting it clatter onto the deck. The engine bay was an absolute nightmare of flashing red strobes, screaming klaxons, and thick, acrid smoke.
My helmet's visor had a massive, spider-webbing crack running straight across the left eye-line. Worse, the violent impact had completely knocked the internal air filters offline. I hacked out a brutal, chest-rattling cough as raw ozone and burning plastic fumes flooded my lungs.
"Kael!" I screamed over the deafening whine of the failing hyperdrive motivator. "Give me—cough—give me a damn status!"
"I... the controls are jammed!" Kael's voice cracked over the comms, teetering on the edge of pure hysteria. "Half the subsystems are going critical! The left sub-light engine just completely died!"
"Fuck... goddammit..." I braced my hands against my knees, trying to draw a clean breath and failing.
For a terrifying, endless second out there, I really thought that was it. Game over. The grand finale. All my careful planning, the meta-knowledge, the promise to save Vasha... totally wiped out by one trigger-happy Imperial gunner.
Our shields had been running on absolute fumes. When I felt that premonition, I was entirely convinced the ISD was hitting us with a dual heavy turbolaser. The kind of anti-capital-ship armament that physically vaporizes whatever it touches.
But it wasn't.
That blinding flash hadn't been super-heated plasma. It was a heavy ion cannon. A weapon that fired highly ionized particles at breathtaking speeds.
And the absolute worst part? Ray shields don't stop ion blasts. Not unless you specifically reconfigure the array frequencies to catch them, which we obviously hadn't.
The Empire didn't want to vaporize us. They wanted to capture the ship. Ion blasts overload and fuse circuitry, computers, flight controls, sensors, weapons, and life-support systems without destroying the hull. They tried to cripple us to prevent the jump.
They were a fraction of a millisecond too late.
But for us, that fraction of a second multiplied the danger by about a thousand percent.
Jumping through hyperspace isn't just flying really fast. It's threading a needle through a chaotic dimension where clipping the mass shadow of a star, a planet, or even a rogue asteroid instantly turns your ship into atomic confetti.
You only survive the trip because a highly advanced nav-computer calculates the routes. If we were on a standard, heavily-mapped hyper-lane, an experienced pilot like Kael might have been able to manually pull the emergency lever and drop us out into real-space safely.
But we had jumped via a completely obscure, unmapped off-axis corridor. We were entirely dependent on the computer.
And as my cosmic luck would have it, the most devastating damage from the ion surge hit the nav-computer itself.
The electrical overflow had completely fried the interface. It was currently stuck in a malfunctioning, corrupted logic loop with extensive hardware damage. It couldn't be turned off, we couldn't disengage the hyperdrive manually, and the screens weren't even showing where the fuck we were going.
We were essentially a blind bullet rocketing through the dimension of light until we either ran out of fuel or crashed into a sun.
GRRR-CHUNK.
The entire ship violently bucked sideways. My boots left the floor plating, and I desperately grabbed onto a thick metal coolant pipe to keep from getting thrown into the bulkhead.
CLANG!
"GAH—motherfucker!"
The fire extinguisher I had just dropped flew across the shifting deck and slammed directly into my lower spine. I cursed the mechanical engineer who designed this ship, his mother, and his entire bloodline.
"Mass shadow!" Kael screamed over the open comm channel, his voice raw with panic. "We're passing too close to a gravitational wake! Hull integrity is failing! We just... we just lost the port stabilizer! The left wing is getting ripped apart!"
Fuck this—
"Beep-beep-boop-wheeeeeee!"
Arachnae's frantic, high-pitched trilling cut through the blaring klaxons from the cockpit down the hall.
Of course. How could I forget about Ryn?
When the ion blast struck the ship, Ryn had been gripping the manual override handle on the primary console. The entire electrical surge had traveled straight up the metal rod and into his arms. The guy had convulsed violently before slumping over, completely unresponsive. Arachnae had dragged him out of the seat and was currently pumping her entire onboard bacta reserve into him, but her medical routines were meant for lacerations and burns, not catastrophic neurological shock. His vital signs were just failing steadily.
This day just keeps getting better and better.
I looked back down at the sparking, half-melted hyperdrive housing. The chemical foam was already starting to bubble away as another small fire reignited underneath it.
"You know what? Fuck it." I kicked the empty extinguisher away. There was absolutely no point in trying to put out minor electrical fires when we were probably two minutes away from blindly slamming into a white dwarf star at lightspeed. We were going to die before the smoke even had a chance to suffocate us.
I let go of the coolant pipe and staggered out of the engine bay, fighting against the erratic, lurching gravity of the ship.
I stumbled into the cockpit. The entire space was washed in the strobing, blood-red light of the emergency displays. Sparks were actively raining down from the overhead light fixtures.
"What's the status back there?!" Kael yelled the second I stepped through the blast door. He was frantically pulling at levers that clearly weren't doing anything, his face pale and slick with sweat. "Can we manually sever the primary fuel lines? Or... or cut the hyperdrive motivator core?!"
"No," I coughed, reaching up to pop the vacuum seals on my collar. "The ion surge fused the manual release valves shut! The whole block is melted together!"
I yanked the cracked helmet off and tossed it onto the deck, sucking in a deep breath of the slightly cleaner cockpit air.
Kael turned around to demand another option, but the words completely died in his throat. His eyes went wide, darting from my heavy, scarred armor up to my face.
"You're... you're a kid?" Kael stammered, looking absolutely horrified. "The Senator's 'mercenary escort' is a kriffing child?!"
"I'm not a kid," I shot back smoothly, wiping a smear of soot off my cheek. "I'm a Dathomirian half-blood. My species ages incredibly slowly. I'm actually sixty-nine standard years old."
Kael blinked, his brain clearly short-circuiting between the imminent threat of death and the absolute absurdity of my claim. "I... what? I've literally never heard of a species doing that."
"Do you really want to debate galactic biology right now?" I snapped, pointing a thumb back toward the sparking engine bay. "Because I'm pretty sure we have bigger problems than my skincare routine!"
"Right—kriff, right," Kael rubbed his face furiously, trying to get back on track. "Okay, what about the secondary nav-relay? If we bypass the primary interface and hotwire the relay directly to the sub-light thrusters, maybe we can force an emergency drop?"
"Tried it in my head," I said grimly. "The ion surge fried the logic boards on the relay too. If we try to push power through it, we'll just overload the sub-light engines and blow the aft section clean off."
"Astromech socket?"
"Don't have one."
"EMP the console?"
"We'd lose life support entirely."
Kael's hands froze on the yoke. The frantic energy seemed to leave his body all at once. He slumped back into the pilot's chair and stared blankly at the swirling blue-and-white tunnel of hyperspace rushing past the viewport.
"We can't drop out," he whispered, his voice going hollow. "With the nav-computer stuck... we're blind. We're just going to hit something. A planet. A star." He swallowed hard, a tremor running through his hands. "I... I hope the Senator takes care of my family."
I stood there, gripping the back of the co-pilot seat where Ryn lay unconscious on the floor beneath it.
A heavy, sickening wave of guilt washed over me. These guys didn't ask for this. I brought them directly into the crosshairs of Vader's flagship, and now they were going to die strapped to chairs, waiting helplessly for a fiery, instantaneous death they couldn't even see coming.
I couldn't just stand here and wait for it to end. I refused.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and looked out at the hypnotic vortex of hyperspace.'
I had an idea, it was not the brightest or safest one, but the only one I had that seemed feasible at all.
Force be damned.Let's do it.
"Kael. Get out of the seat."
"W-w-what?" Kael blinked, his eyes darting wildly from the hypnotic, swirling vortex of the hyperspace tunnel back to my face. "Why? Like... do you actually have an idea? Because if you do, um, you should probably just tell me what to press!"
"I have an idea," I said grimly, stepping closer and waving him up. "But first, I need to take a much closer look at the primary nav-computer interface. And I can't do that with you sitting directly over the main auxiliary routing hub. Just—get up, Kael. Move."
Kael swallowed hard, his hands shaking as he frantically unbuckled his crash webbing. He practically stumbled backward out of the chair, his boots slipping slightly on the slick deck.
I immediately slid into the pilot's seat. To my right, the co-pilot station sat empty, scorched and dead from the surge that had nearly killed Ryn. Below the main console, buried behind layers of reinforced durasteel casing, lay the beating heart of the Scythe's navigation system.
I didn't reach for a hydro-spanner or a laser cutter. I just pressed my bare fingertips flat against the warm metal of the console, closed my eyes, and let my perception sink past the physical barriers.
My mind instantly bypassed the durasteel and plunged into the microscopic architecture of the ship's computer.
I could see the sensor arrays. They were fine—well, mostly fine. The primary mass-shadow detectors were actively pinging, collecting gravitational field data from every celestial body within sensor range. Raw information flooded through the circuits in steady electrical pulses.
But the navigation computer itself?
Completely. Fucking. Dead.
The quantum processing core of the Nav computer looked like someone had taken a plasma piss to a Rubik's cube. Half the logic pathways were melted into slag. The other half were firing random, corrupted signals that looped back into themselves like a digital ouroboros. Voltage spikes arced through broken transistors. Data packets slammed into dead-end relays and just... scattered into electrical noise.
But there were a few saving grace.
"The sensors are still working," I muttered, my eyes still closed. "They're collecting gravitational field data, but—"
"Wait, how... how do you know that?" Kael asked, his voice trembling slightly. "You haven't even opened the access panel. You don't have, like, a diagnostic scanner built inside your head like those cyborg frea—ahem—guys, do you?"
I ignored him completely and kept talking, more to myself than anyone else.
"The primary logic board is fried. The secondary quantum relay is... yeah, that's just a chunk of melted metal now. The translation sequencer won't even initialize. And the emergency drop protocol is completely unresponsive because the manual override circuit is—" I winced. "—yeah, that's literally on fire somewhere inside the casing."
Kael's mouth opened and closed like a suffocating fish.
I opened my eyes and looked back at him.
"So we're going to crash," I said flatly.
"W-what—"
"Unless I do something incredibly stupid."
I didn't wait for his reply.
The computer can't do the math anymore. So... I guess I'm just going to have to do it for them
I pressed both palms flat against the console, closed my eyes again, and dove.
---
The first thing I tried was following a sensor ping.
The mass-shadow detector, which operated using some weird quantum tunnelling technology which allowed a particle's probability wave to extend into and beyond forbidden regions, allowing the sensor to sense objects faster than even the speed of light. It was honestly an blackbox because quantum physics is a bitch that I haven't been able to tame in both my lives together. But what I needed to know was just that It senses off something massive from front, a bit to the left of our current path—a red giant, maybe, or a brown dwarf—a signal that came seemed to detect a sharp spike in localized spacetime curvature.
How did I understand that from raw bits? Pure fucking calculations of raw bits and bytes to human understandable data, hundred of times each second.
Leaving out a part of my attention on the sensor, with my other part, I tried to reach out with hyper-perception toward another part of the ship, tracing the signal output from the nav-computer towards the maneuvering thruster control circuit, and tried to mentally push the electrical current toward the "right turn" command.
Force, I hope it works. Otherwise I wouldn't even have atoms left intact for fuck's sake...
Then....the ship lurched violently.
"WHOA—what in the kriffing hell was that?!" Kael shouted, grabbing onto a nearby support beam.
I am alive? I am ALIVE!
Maybe pushed a bit too hard, but it fucking worked...
I dialed it back, tried again. Gentler this time. A tiny nudge to the signal pathways, just enough to—
The ship bucked the opposite direction.
Shit.
This was like trying to steer a speeder bike by telekinetically flicking individual neurons in the throttle servo. Except the speeder bike was hurtling through a minefield at a thousand times the speed of light, and I was using a blindfold made of broken glass.
I take my words back. I don't wanna do maths anymore...T_T
---
Despite how much we don't want to do something, we still have to do it. That includes changing the diapers of your ten-shits-a-day sibling because mom is too busy working. That also includes doing more mathematical calculations per seconds than I had jerked off my whole life.
I didn't realize when did I lose the track of time. It felt weird.
I stopped counting, stopped thinking of anything else but the raw bits of data, the calculations in my mind and steering the thrusters.
There was only the rhythm of sensor pings, the electric hum of failing circuits, the frantic chase of trying to route power through half-melted relays before the next gravitational spike showed up on the scopes.
Somewhere in between, I also lost track of what am I?
Am I a human sitting inside a burning ship? Or was I was the burning ship carrying humans and droids aboard it?
When a wire snapped somewhere in the main console, I felt it like a phantom limb going numb. I naturally grabbed the broken ends with Force and held them together, forcing the current to jump the gap.
When the turbulence caused parts of ship to deform and about to break, I help it together with Force.
When.....
I had felt wetness, but couldn't tell whether it was blood from my bleeding nose or the fuel leaking in the storage.
Seal it.
Another sensor ping. Gravitational density spiking hard to the right. I shoved the signal toward the left maneuvering cluster, felt the thrusters fire, felt the ship barely veer away from whatever cosmic meat-grinder we'd almost flown into.
The translator circuit tried to reboot itself. I felt the corrupted logic loop start to spiral and immediately choked it off before it could fry the one remaining functional relay.
My head was pounding...or was it the circuits?
Keep going. Just keep going.
I tried to build a mental map. Gravitational fields were like hills and valleys. High-density zones were the holes—black holes, neutron stars, densely-packed planetary clusters. Avoid those. Steer toward the "flat" spots where spacetime was calm.
Except hyperspace wasn't three-dimensional. The gravitational data didn't always map cleanly to left-right-up-down. Sometimes a "safe" zone would suddenly invert into a gravity well because we'd shifted into a higher-dimensional layer where the rules of space time were different.
It was like playing 4D chess while someone kept adding new dimensions mid-game.
Doesn't matter...keep...calculating...keep...controlling...
---
I tried rerouting power to the inertial dampener pre-sync array. Maybe if I could get one subsystem of the translation sequence operational, I could—
Nope. The array didn't even have power anymore. The conduit was completely severed three meters down inside the hull.
I tried bridging it telekinetically.
The electrical feedback felt like sticking a fork in a wall socket. My whole body jerked, and I tasted copper.
Fuck. Okay. Bad idea. Don't do that again.
---
Another ping. Another lurch. Another desperate scramble to reroute a signal through a path that technically shouldn't work but somehow did because I was holding two melted wires together with my mind and praying the current didn't arc into something explosive.
I was pretty sure I was crying. Hard to tell.
The ship shuddered again. Something in the aft section groaned like a dying bantha. I tried reaching out to the Force but found my whole self shudder mentally. It was as if I even tried shifting my attention elsewhere again, I would just collapse.
I...can't. This is impossible...completely impossible.
A human brain—even one running on Force-assisted adrenaline and desperation—cannot process millions of sensor pings per second. I couldn't see the whole picture. I couldn't plan ahead. I was just reacting, over and over and over, trying to keep us from slamming into the next mass shadow before the sensors even finished pinging the last one.
I was hitting a wall. The absolute biological limit of how much information a chunk of meat could process before it just... gave up.
And I could feel it. The wall. Right there. An invisible ceiling pressing down on my skull.
I couldn't break through it.
No amount of training, no amount of stress conditioning could help it
There was just so much to control...so much to pay attention to...
From somewhere deep within the machines came a voice...why do you need to? Are you controlling the machine...or commanding it?
Controlling....? Commanding...? How was it different...I couldn't command the ship without controlling it, could I?
Or did I need to?
...
...
Ah...so that's what it meant.
I don't know how to describe it.
It was like... staring at one of those optical illusions where it's a vase, and then you blink and suddenly it's two faces, and you can't unsee it.
The ship stopped feeling like a ship.
The circuits stopped feeling like circuits.
Everything just... connected.
The maneuvering thrusters weren't separate systems anymore. They were muscles. The sensor arrays weren't external tools. They were eyes. The power conduits weren't wires—they were veins, arteries, the flow of blood keeping a body alive.
I stopped thinking about where to send the signals.
I just moved.
---
It was effortless.
No. That's not the right word.
It was natural.
Like breathing. Like walking. You don't think about which neurons to fire to make your leg swing forward. You just... walk.
Why did you need to micromanage every connection in the ship, every circuit, even correction...when you are the ship.
---
Somewhere far away, I was vaguely aware that my body was still sitting in the pilot's chair. That my hands were still pressed against the console. That blood was dripping from my nose onto the durasteel plating.
But it didn't matter.
The ship and I had merged into something bigger. Something whole.
And we were flying.
Following some invisible current I couldn't name but somehow felt. A pull. A whisper in the back of my mind that said this way, just a little further, this way...
I followed it.
---
Hours passed.
Or maybe minutes.
Or maybe days.
Time didn't exist in the grey space between my mind and the machine.
I felt the hyperdrive fuel levels slowly, slowly draining. Felt the quantum core of the nav-computer finally give up its last ghost and go completely inert. Felt a coolant line rupture in the aft section and immediately rerouted pressure to compensate.
Somewhere behind me, Kael was yelling something. I couldn't hear the words.
Didn't matter.
The current was getting stronger now. The pull in the Force—yes, it was the Force, I could feel it now—was leading me somewhere.
I just followed.
---
The ship lurched suddenly.
We dropped out of hyperspace like a stone falling out of the sky.
Suddenly, the connection snapped. The ship stopped being part of me. The circuits stopped being veins. Everything collapsed back into metal and wire and failing components, and the sensory overload hit me like a freight train.
Alarms. Klaxons. Kael screaming. Sparks raining from the ceiling.
Through the viewport, I saw it.
A planet.
Dark. Stormy. Wrapped in layers of black clouds and violent, crackling lightning.
The gravitational pull was already dragging us in.
I tried to reach for the controls.
My hands wouldn't move.
Oh.
Oh, I'm...
The edges of my vision went grey.
I heard Kael diving for the manual flight stick.
I heard Arachnae shrieking something in panicked binary.
And then I heard nothing at all.
---
A/N: Ezra learned two new things in this chapter, can you guess what?
And throw your powerstones here if you liked the chapter. And also, feel free to tell your thoughts about the current story and all.
Also as always, support the cause (me) and read the next 2 chapters on Patreon!
Link: www.patreon.com/AbstractoX