Status: in progress
KoToR II FF
Chapter One
The man floated in the kalto tank, his eyes shut, the yellow liquid converging around him, though his urge to breathe ceased as soft electrical current prevented his heart from stopping and his brain from shutting down. In his state, he was unaware of someone in the next room, fiddling with the controls for the kalto tanks.
The electrical current stopped. Instantly, the man’s unusual training kicked in, and he began to breathe again. However, he was submerged in liquid. Now a more advanced technique in his unorthodox upbringing made itself known, using some unnatural power to regulate his body rates without taking in any oxygen. This would only keep him alive so long. It was only a matter of time before the power ran out.
After all, he hadn’t utilized his powers in nearly a decade.
The liquid became filled with powerful sedatives to keep the powerful man unconscious while he suffocated. It was all just a precaution, though. The man would die just as a normal man would. He had lost his significant powers seven years earlier, after the Mandalorian Wars. He had been stripped of his powers, judged by people like him.
Whoever watched the man from the control room watched his heart rate slow and his brain activities weaken. He was dying. The heart monitor was emitting a steady note.
The floating man loosed a yell and the plasti-glass exploded outward, causing the yellow liquid to burst out. The man lay sprawled on the ground, unconscious, but very much alive.
The figure in the control room retreated to report the news to its master.
In the meantime, the man lay there. He wore a white, skin tight pair of medical shorts, a white, paper shirt that buttoned in the back, and white, non-slip, medical sneakers. The yellow liquid hadn’t stained or soaked anything, one of the concoction’s curious properties.
Now that the sedatives were no longer keeping him in slumber, the man awakened in minutes. When he did, he pushed his face up off the tiled floor and blinked in the glare of the blinding white lights.
As the man stood, his eyes adjusted, allowing him to survey his surroundings. Of the seven kalto tanks in the room, two were occupied and his was demolished. The occupied ones held corpses, people who died the same way he was meant to.
He quickly assessed the situation. He didn’t remember much, only that he was in the Peragus II asteroid mining facility. He had been sifting through some old droid parts, looking for a neural core replacement for a damaged mining droid. The other workers did odd jobs, but they rarely spoke to the man. They thought him odd and dangerous. Perhaps he was.
The man guessed that the two dead workers had been placed in kalto tanks to recover from some wound they’d sustained whilst mining. However, the man couldn’t remember having sustained an injury to place him in a kalto tank.
The only door that led out of the room was open, but it was trying to close and sparking as something within the door’s mechanics forced it back open. It made a loud ker-chunk sound every time it re-opened.
The man stepped forward, but the baggy paper shirt kept pulling at his arms and torso. With a small grunt of irritation, the man tore the flimsy material off of his well toned body, letting the scraps drift to the floor and float on the surfaces of the puddles of kalto tank fluid. He moved past the doorway, into a small, square room.
On each wall in this room was a door just like the one he’d just come through, ten feet wide, eight feet tall, with a locking mechanism in the center. They were all shut, sans the one behind the man. Two of the three shut doors were locked, signaled by a red light on the access panel. The man stepped to the door on the left, the only one with a green access light. As the door’s motions sensors registered him, the door swished open for him, revealing the control room.
The man stepped inside and found the control panel. It was easy, since the room was bare, but for that. The man approached it and examined the settings on the options screen:
SEDATIVES – 10
VOLTAGE – 0
SYSTEMS – ALL
The panel was hacked. No standard program could be made to carry out fatal commands such as these. Whoever did this was a computer specialist, or a hacking droid. Since all of the droids allowed in this part of the Peragus II mining base were damaged, low AI droids, it would have had to been an intruder. However, no ships were docked at the mining facility.
The murderer had to have been a computer savvy miner.
The man tapped the screen, bringing up the main functions menu. He hit “Door Functions” and looked at the options:
ACCESS MEDICAL BAY
ACCESS STORAGE ROOM
The man tapped both. The doors to both rooms unlocked and swished open. The storage room door was behind the man, inside the control room. The medical bay was the door opposite the control room from the square hall.
The man took note of the “ACCESS LOBBY” option blinking red at the bottom of the screen. That was the jammed door. The man would have to find a weapon or power tool to try to force the door open with.
The man checked the storage room first. The only things he found in the plast-steel cylinders were medical tools. Needles, bandages, tourniquet’s, etc.
With mounting trepidation, the man left and entered the medical bay. Out of the 15 beds in there, only two were occupied, and both occupants seemed to be dead. One was an ancient woman wearing a simple brown robe with a prominent hood covering her milk-white eyes. Silver hair flowed out of the hood in two thick braids, one on either side. Both braids ended halfway down her torso and had thick, golden bands around the tips. Her lips were drawn and wrinkled, her face heavily lined and wrinkled.
The man decided he wouldn’t touch the corpse unless he deemed it absolutely necessary. Instead, he’d search the dead miner on the bed next to her for a power tool of some kind.
As luck would have it, the man was carrying a sturdy plasma torch in his belt during his death. It wasn’t anyone the man recognized, as the workers avoided him anyway.
But where had that lady come from? Surely she wasn’t a worker.
The man grabbed the plasma torch and made to leave the medical bay when a cold, hard voice stopped him.
“Did you find what you are looking for amongst the dead?”
The man whirled about flicking on the green-flamed torch and flourishing it in front of him. When the speaker came clear to him, he simply stared in shock. There stood the old lady, perfectly alive and striding ever closer.
The electrical current stopped. Instantly, the man’s unusual training kicked in, and he began to breathe again. However, he was submerged in liquid. Now a more advanced technique in his unorthodox upbringing made itself known, using some unnatural power to regulate his body rates without taking in any oxygen. This would only keep him alive so long. It was only a matter of time before the power ran out.
After all, he hadn’t utilized his powers in nearly a decade.
The liquid became filled with powerful sedatives to keep the powerful man unconscious while he suffocated. It was all just a precaution, though. The man would die just as a normal man would. He had lost his significant powers seven years earlier, after the Mandalorian Wars. He had been stripped of his powers, judged by people like him.
Whoever watched the man from the control room watched his heart rate slow and his brain activities weaken. He was dying. The heart monitor was emitting a steady note.
The floating man loosed a yell and the plasti-glass exploded outward, causing the yellow liquid to burst out. The man lay sprawled on the ground, unconscious, but very much alive.
The figure in the control room retreated to report the news to its master.
In the meantime, the man lay there. He wore a white, skin tight pair of medical shorts, a white, paper shirt that buttoned in the back, and white, non-slip, medical sneakers. The yellow liquid hadn’t stained or soaked anything, one of the concoction’s curious properties.
Now that the sedatives were no longer keeping him in slumber, the man awakened in minutes. When he did, he pushed his face up off the tiled floor and blinked in the glare of the blinding white lights.
As the man stood, his eyes adjusted, allowing him to survey his surroundings. Of the seven kalto tanks in the room, two were occupied and his was demolished. The occupied ones held corpses, people who died the same way he was meant to.
He quickly assessed the situation. He didn’t remember much, only that he was in the Peragus II asteroid mining facility. He had been sifting through some old droid parts, looking for a neural core replacement for a damaged mining droid. The other workers did odd jobs, but they rarely spoke to the man. They thought him odd and dangerous. Perhaps he was.
The man guessed that the two dead workers had been placed in kalto tanks to recover from some wound they’d sustained whilst mining. However, the man couldn’t remember having sustained an injury to place him in a kalto tank.
The only door that led out of the room was open, but it was trying to close and sparking as something within the door’s mechanics forced it back open. It made a loud ker-chunk sound every time it re-opened.
The man stepped forward, but the baggy paper shirt kept pulling at his arms and torso. With a small grunt of irritation, the man tore the flimsy material off of his well toned body, letting the scraps drift to the floor and float on the surfaces of the puddles of kalto tank fluid. He moved past the doorway, into a small, square room.
On each wall in this room was a door just like the one he’d just come through, ten feet wide, eight feet tall, with a locking mechanism in the center. They were all shut, sans the one behind the man. Two of the three shut doors were locked, signaled by a red light on the access panel. The man stepped to the door on the left, the only one with a green access light. As the door’s motions sensors registered him, the door swished open for him, revealing the control room.
The man stepped inside and found the control panel. It was easy, since the room was bare, but for that. The man approached it and examined the settings on the options screen:
SEDATIVES – 10
VOLTAGE – 0
SYSTEMS – ALL
The panel was hacked. No standard program could be made to carry out fatal commands such as these. Whoever did this was a computer specialist, or a hacking droid. Since all of the droids allowed in this part of the Peragus II mining base were damaged, low AI droids, it would have had to been an intruder. However, no ships were docked at the mining facility.
The murderer had to have been a computer savvy miner.
The man tapped the screen, bringing up the main functions menu. He hit “Door Functions” and looked at the options:
ACCESS MEDICAL BAY
ACCESS STORAGE ROOM
The man tapped both. The doors to both rooms unlocked and swished open. The storage room door was behind the man, inside the control room. The medical bay was the door opposite the control room from the square hall.
The man took note of the “ACCESS LOBBY” option blinking red at the bottom of the screen. That was the jammed door. The man would have to find a weapon or power tool to try to force the door open with.
The man checked the storage room first. The only things he found in the plast-steel cylinders were medical tools. Needles, bandages, tourniquet’s, etc.
With mounting trepidation, the man left and entered the medical bay. Out of the 15 beds in there, only two were occupied, and both occupants seemed to be dead. One was an ancient woman wearing a simple brown robe with a prominent hood covering her milk-white eyes. Silver hair flowed out of the hood in two thick braids, one on either side. Both braids ended halfway down her torso and had thick, golden bands around the tips. Her lips were drawn and wrinkled, her face heavily lined and wrinkled.
The man decided he wouldn’t touch the corpse unless he deemed it absolutely necessary. Instead, he’d search the dead miner on the bed next to her for a power tool of some kind.
As luck would have it, the man was carrying a sturdy plasma torch in his belt during his death. It wasn’t anyone the man recognized, as the workers avoided him anyway.
But where had that lady come from? Surely she wasn’t a worker.
The man grabbed the plasma torch and made to leave the medical bay when a cold, hard voice stopped him.
“Did you find what you are looking for amongst the dead?”
The man whirled about flicking on the green-flamed torch and flourishing it in front of him. When the speaker came clear to him, he simply stared in shock. There stood the old lady, perfectly alive and striding ever closer.