I climbed down the ladder.
A stink of sickly-sweet rot was already leaking up from below.
Between that and the dark pressing in from every side, my nerves were shot.
Crawling blind into the unknown, into a place that literally reeked of death, wasn’t helping.
Still, my hands and feet kept finding the rungs on their own, planting themselves without me thinking about it.
The shaft we were descending turned out to be deeper than expected.
We’d been dropping fast for almost a minute now, and it just kept going.
What really set me on edge was the metallic clatter that followed the Bodyguard’s every move.
If anyone was waiting down there, they already knew we were coming.
We finally hit the bottom of the shaft.
How did I know?
Simple — something metal struck concrete with a clang.
I froze, and a wave of relief hit me when I heard the Bodyguard’s irritated grumbling.
“You still alive down there?”
“No thanks to you.
A rung gave out.
Guess I’m jumping.”
“Nothing serious, then.”
“Easy for you to say.
I’m the one who just hit the ground.”
“Train your reflexes more.
Besides, you’re made of metal.
You don’t feel pain.”
He didn’t have a comeback for that, so he just stood there, waiting for me to climb down, creaking his joints in annoyance.
I landed softly and took stock of how I felt.
The Force stayed quiet, but some low hum of nerves kept making me twitch.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark back in the cave, but down here that only bought me blurry, half-formed silhouettes — which somehow made things worse, not better.
“I’m seeing a whole lot of nothing.
So how about it, oh magnificent one — describe our surroundings.”
A short pause, then the answer came.
“You’ll see for yourself in a moment.”
Footsteps, a soft click, and the room filled with dim white light.
Well, that worked out.
The lamps overhead flickered, casting an uneven glow down the corridor.
“All right, let’s see what’s here.
Stay sharp — this place could be full of nasty surprises.
Whoever built a base like this wouldn’t have skipped security.”
“Got it, got it.”
We crept forward.
A thick layer of dust, concrete grit, and some kind of white residue swallowed the sound of our footsteps.
It reminded me of a subway tunnel — curved walls, the faint hum of machinery, shadows pooling in every corner.
All of it added up to a distinctly unpleasant feeling, like I’d wandered into a horror game right before the monsters swarmed.
I shook off the thought and forced myself to focus on the here and now.
We reached the first doorway, a black gap in the wall like an empty eye socket in a skull.
Honestly, I had zero interest in going in there myself.
I waved the droid ahead to check the room and stayed back to cover the corridor.
“Clear.” The flat metallic voice right behind me made me flinch.
I hadn’t even heard him come back.
The dust muffled everything, and the silence down here was tomb-quiet to begin with. This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
“Just some equipment.
Nothing else.”
“Keep moving.”
I let the Force move through me, and it steadied me a little, but that sticky, clinging fear never fully let go.
The underground bunker felt like a mad scientist’s laboratory.
Deactivated medical droids stood everywhere, and a persistent medical smell mixed with something rotten hung in the air.
The deeper we went, the stronger it got.
I opened another door and nearly threw up on the spot.
Whatever I’d been smelling before now seemed practically like fresh forest air by comparison.
The room held several tanks, each about the height of a person, still glowing faintly green.
Instruments lined the walls, their warning lights blinking about low power.
Behind a thick layer of green mold coating the glass, something shapeless floated.
There was no telling what it had once been, and it was clearly the source of the stench.
I pinched my nose and got out of there as fast as I could.
Let the droid search the room — he didn’t have a sense of smell, so it wouldn’t cost him anything.
An hour of careful exploring later, we finished the first sweep.
Thank the Force we turned out to be the only living things down here.
The place turned out to be big — three levels.
On the middle floor sat four rooms that looked like they’d once been operating theaters or labs.
Below that were three more: a generator room somehow still running on scraps of leftover power, that horror show of a room with the tanks, and what might have been a storage area.
Above us was a command center of some kind, plus a corridor we decided to check out later.
The data stored in the computers interested me a lot more than whatever was down that corridor.
The equipment looked familiar, but dated somehow — like seeing a rotary phone.
You still know how it works, but it looks off in a modern context.
I’d never come across tech like this anywhere in our own backwater, which gave me hope that this place had been forgotten a long time ago.
I powered up the console — thankfully it didn’t ask for an access code — and started digging through whatever files had survived.
Khran stood beside me, keeping the entrance covered.
We hadn’t found anyone, sure, but there was always a chance something could still go wrong.
The data was thin.
Very thin.
Whoever had run this place had wiped their research files clean on the way out, which made it next to impossible to piece together what had actually happened here.
The one thing I did manage to dig up was the date the base had gone into standby: more than seventy years ago.
Nobody had touched this computer since.
It was a wonder there was still any power left in it at all.
If nobody had set foot in this lab in seventy years, odds were good nobody was coming back.
“Master, your facial expression should be read as either joy or a threat.
According to my records, sentients smile that way when experiencing strong psychologi—”
“Oh, shut up.
Let me enjoy the moment.
I think we just found a new home.
It just needs a serious cleaning.
Come on, let’s see the rest of it.
I wonder where we end up.”
“According to the technical documentation, the corridor leads to a hangar.”
“And when exactly did you figure that out?
Wander off from guarding the entrance hoping something would kill me so you’d finally be free?”
“Negative, Master.
It’s right there.” A metal hand pointed off to the right of the exit, where a rectangular shape stood out faintly in the dark.
“A map of all the levels is hanging on the wall.”
“Well, since you’re so observant, you lead the way.”
Well, I had my own homegrown methods for illegally breaking into secured facilities.
I tried to force the panels apart with the Force and hit a wall — they barely budged, like they’d been welded shut on the other side.
After two minutes of getting nowhere, irritation took hold of me and quickly curdled into rage.
Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, I forced those cursed doors open until they finally ground apart with a dull screech.
I collapsed on the cold floor, gasping for breath.
Strange — the effort hadn’t even been physical, and yet I was sweating like I’d just finished an hour of hard training.
“It’s not rational to destroy your own property.”
“I know.
I’m still pretty proud of myself.”
“Initiating protocol bewilderment.
Human emotions remain a mystery to me.
Logic states they’re useless.
Oh dear, what a shame.”
“I’ll transfer you to a toilet-scrubbing droid,” I waved him off.
“You can share your thoughts with the plumbing.”
“Veiled order to shut up acknowledged.”
With that little exchange settled, I stepped through the hangar doorway.
Well.
Not bad at all.
A space fifty meters by fifty meters opened up in front of me.
My faint hope of finding an abandoned starship in here didn’t pan out.
I sulked about it for a few seconds, then got on with inspecting the place.
The hangar doors sat in the ceiling, and there was no telling what lay beyond them.
A platform in the floor looked like it was meant to lift a ship up to those doors.
I’d need to figure out where they actually opened onto.
One Hutt of a lot of things weren’t working — the power generators needed replacing, and fast.
A couple of workbenches, stripped of any equipment, sat in the corner, along with a scattering of thoroughly rusted parts on the floor.
That was basically the whole room.
“Excellent find, my loyal, soulless friend.
You’ve earned yourself a promotion.”
“Will you finally give me the parts I’ve been asking for?” He even attempted a hand clap in anticipation — it looked ridiculous.
“I really do need new finger phalanges.
Otherwise—”
“Stop, stop.
Give me a full list of everything you need later.
Right now I’ve got a different kind of promotion for you.”
“Which is?”
“From now on, you’re not Khran.
You’re Han.”
The tin can apparently didn’t appreciate the grand gesture.
He turned his back on me, sat down on the floor, wrapped his arms around his knees, and started rocking, doing his best impression of deep depression.
“Ugh, you ungrateful droid.
Fine, you’ll get your parts.
Now let’s get out of here.
Great things await us.”
————— com / BifrostFics