Chapter Two – Crashed Relics

The Lucky Cut had a sound Jek Tora didn't like. More accurately, it had too many sounds he didn't like: grinding, whirring, thumping, coughing—and now, screaming.

The cockpit screamed again. Not a person—the alarm system. A harsh, three-tone siren that meant the stabilizers were failing. Again.

"You're not dying today," Jek muttered, yanking open a side panel and smacking it hard with the heel of his boot. A sputter, a cough, and the lights dimmed, then flared back to life. "Not before I get paid."

“Statistically,” chirped a voice beside him, “this vessel’s crash survival index just dropped below thirty-two percent.”

Jek glanced down at the waist-high droid clutching a handrail with mismatched claws. “Not helping, Chip.”

The droid’s cracked optical sensor flickered. “Apologies. I thought you preferred honesty.”

“I prefer engines that don’t explode.”

Chip’s voice box stuttered, emitted a short burst of static, then resolved into a panicked tune: “♪ The stars go by, the stars go by—hold your breath or you might die! ♪”

“Stop. Singing.”

The nav droid, a cracked dome bolted to the ceiling, sparked violently and dropped with a thunk. Smoke trickled from its casing.

Chip let out a synthetic whimper. “I liked that one. It had a soothing accent.”

“Focus, Chip. We’re going down.”

The nav display now showed an unfamiliar system—three moons, no starports, no beacon codes. And one planet, spinning slow and red like a half-healed wound.

Ambria.

He hadn’t plotted this course.

He hadn’t even heard of the planet until... well, until whatever was in the cargo hold had started humming.

Three days ago, the job had sounded simple. Deliver a sealed case to a buyer in the Outer Rim. No questions, double the credits if unopened. The client had been one of those well-dressed, too-polite types who gave Jek the creeps. Said he represented a collector of rare Force-related antiquities.

Jek didn’t ask for details. He never did. Rule one of staying alive was don’t get curious.

But on the second day, the crate had started glowing. Just faintly. Just enough that he noticed. Just enough that he looked.

The seal hadn’t broken. Not technically. But a corner had cracked during a turbulence surge near the edge of Wild Space. And from inside, a shard of obsidian had slipped halfway into view.

Jek had seen weird relics before. Old Jedi lightsaber cores, fossilized kyber fragments, cursed temple icons. But this thing? It had glyphs on it.

Not etched. Grown. Like veins of silver curling through volcanic glass, pulsing faintly in rhythm with his heart.

He hadn’t touched it.

But it had felt like it had touched him.

Now, the planet below was pulling them in fast.

He wrestled the yoke, guiding the Lucky Cut through a burst of high-atmosphere static. The ship groaned like an old beast, hull plating shuddering as the nose tilted down.

No sign of cities. No beacons. Just miles of cracked salt flats, black canyons, and storm clouds gathering over a distant ridge.

As they descended, the lights in the cargo hold flickered again.

The crate was humming.

Jek shouted over the rising wind, more to himself than the ship: “No Force nonsense! I said NO Force nonsense!”

Chip pinged. “Technically, you said that yesterday. It didn’t work then, either.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”

The crash was more of a scrape, technically.

The Lucky Cut plowed into a flat basin of reddish dust and salt, skidding along the surface for a good three hundred meters before smashing to a stop against a cluster of ancient stone spires.

The nose crumpled. The engines died. The nav droid sparked and fell from the ceiling with a sad fizzle.

Jek coughed, waved away the smoke, and unbuckled himself with a groan.

“Still alive,” he muttered. “That counts for something.”

From the floor, Chip groaned electronically. “I believe I saw my own backup memory core.”

“You don’t have one.”

“I believe I imagined seeing one.”

Jek popped the hatch and dropped to the ground, boots crunching in the dry dust. The air was hot, metallic. The kind of heat that settled behind the eyes.

The landscape stretched out like a graveyard of forgotten things—jagged stone towers, thorned brush, bones bleached under twin suns.

Jek pulled his scarf up and made his way to the cargo hold.

The crate was open.

Not broken. Not forced. Opened.

The obsidian shard sat exposed now, nestled in black silk that shimmered faintly in the dim red light. It wasn’t large, maybe the size of a palm. But the glyphs along its surface pulsed, and the air around it hummed.

Chip hovered behind him, chassis wobbling. “Jek… it’s singing.”

“You hear that too?”

“Not sound. Pressure. Like a thought with bad grammar.”

Jek stared at the shard. It reminded him of something he’d seen on Jedha, once. An old ruin buried in sand. Symbols no one could translate, singing to no one but the dead.

He reached for it.

Then stopped.

Instead, he pulled out a scanner and pointed it at the shard.

Static. No readings.

He tried again. The scanner shut down.

“Of course,” he muttered. “Of course it doesn’t scan. That’d be too easy.”

Chip leaned in, servo whirring. “We should not take it.”

“I agree.”

“You’re taking it.”

Jek sighed, pulled on his field jacket, and strapped a blaster to his thigh. “Yeah.”

He tucked the shard into a padded pouch beneath his coat.

The wind had changed.

Off in the distance, the salt flats gave way to blackened stone and crumbling ravines. Canyons stretched like fingers toward the horizon, scorched and veined with glassy residue—like something had once tried to burn the ground clean and failed.

And then he saw it.

Half-buried in the haze, rising from the far edge of a ravine, a structure. No, a spire. Not natural. The silhouette was too straight, too deliberate. Metal and stone fused at odd angles, with scaffold arms jutting like broken bones. A faint red light blinked near the summit. One slow pulse every few seconds.

Chip climbed a rock beside him and tilted his cracked optical sensor toward the structure. “That’s not a temple.”

“Nope,” Jek said, squinting. “Wrong kind of wrong.”

“Industrial. Maybe corporate. Signal tower or research relay, though the architecture's… distressed.”

“Distressed,” Jek repeated, glancing at the blinking light. “That's what we’re calling a haunted ruin now?”

“I do not believe in hauntings. I do, however, believe in residual security systems. And tetanus.”

Jek looked at the blinking light again. It didn’t flash like a distress signal. It pulsed—slow, deliberate. Waiting.

Whatever it was, it had survived. Through the war, the Empire, the fall.

And it was still powered.

He adjusted his pack and took a step toward the canyon. Then stopped.

They weren’t ready for that yet.

He turned instead toward the shimmer he’d seen earlier. Faint markings on stone just past the salt flat’s edge. Ruins, maybe. Safer than half-dead factories blinking in the dark.

“Later,” he muttered.

Chip hesitated. “We’re going toward the unscannable relic’s call, but away from the spooky tower? Is that… braver?”

“It’s called strategy.”

“Ah. I’ve never seen you use it before.”

Jek ignored him and started walking.

Behind them, the Lucky Cut let out a final, wheezing sigh.

In the wind, something almost sounded like laughter.