Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

[Inyos Aamoran]

Somewhere in the back of Inyos' mind, a headache began to manifest. Sarcasm reared it's ugly head, and it was only the fact that his jaw was clamped shut with concentration that prevented some sort of retort from springboarding off his tongue. No one except Mandan had ever managed to be quite so frustrating at quite such an inappropriate moment; but unlike Mandan, Inyos doubted that s'Ilancy was attempting to irritate him on purpose.

He drew a breath.

"You see the console marked 'weapons control'?"

Silence descended for a beat.

"Those are the weapons controls."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Oh."

She peeked her good eye open long enough to make out the lettering, and huffed out a breath from her nostrils. And in the next instant, as her fingers ran over the controls in jerky movements, she gave a rather indignant grumble.

"Dan was always the one who insisted on doing things like this."

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos tore his attention away from the flight controls for just long enough to throw an exasperated look in her direction.

"You're more than welcome to switch places, if you'd rather I operated the guns, and you concentrated on dodging fire from the precision-engineered killing machine on our tails?"

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Shut up!"

It was an uncharacteristic snap that she delivered, but one that also hearkened back to the old days. She had been more dismissive and anxious so many years ago, and it was as if - right now - she was once more in the cockpit of some small fighter that Dan had managed to cajole her into. And of course, as always, it never seemed to work out as he had intended. Which always left her to clutch her stomach with one hand and cover her mouth with the other.

Just like old times.

But, dogged as ever, the Lupine forced herself to hurriedly acclimate herself to the weapons controls.

The presence of vulture droids was a disturbing reminder of her past, and s'Il ground her teeth together as she concentrated.

[Inyos Aamoran]

Attention returned to flying, Inyos forced the muscles in his jaw to unclench. He couldn't hear the telltale reverberations through the hull of the ship's aft cannon unleashing bolts of plasma towards their pursuer, but with any luck that was because he was flying wild enough to prevent the Vulture Droid from getting into their aft quarter.

For a moment, he allowed his eyes to stray to the proximity sensors. Staying in the field was the best way of avoiding getting shot - making a break for the planet would rob him of any obstacles that he could weave around and evade their robot hunter - but it was only a matter of time before another...

His stomach sank as a new power reading appeared on the sensor grid, half a klick ahead.

"Son of a Sith," he hissed under his breath, jamming the controls hard to port and sending the debris field into a sickening spiral that even the inertial dampeners failed to cope with. Soon, the planet loomed in the viewport ahead of them, but Inyos' evasive flying refused to let it remain still.

He risked another glance at the screen. The first fighter had already peeled off and was in hot pursuit; the second had merely made a minor correction to it's course, and was on their heels as well.

He tried to swallow, but his throat was busy doing a Tatooine impression. "The good news," he managed to say, keeping his voice as calm as he could, "Is that your odds of hitting something just doubled."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Like some mother hen scolding a disobedient child, s'Il huffed just a little as she barely managed to keep the one target in her crosshairs.

"I was under the impression - " she was able to fire off a few shots, but both went wide as her concentration was far from where it should've been.

"... that when I agreed to accompany you, a situation like this was not going to be a worry."

Another few shots, and she clipped one of their pursuers along one wing. It was enough to make the droid wobble on its' axis of rotation, but until she followed up with something a bit more final, it seemed that there would still be two.

[Inyos Aamoran]

"On the contrary, Master s'Ilancy," Inyos countered. "I seem to remember being quite clear about the possible dangers on this trip."

Inyos threw the shuttle into a corkscrew, before breaking sharply into a weaving climb. His plan was to keep their movements as erratic and unpredictable as possible, to prevent the droids chasing them from predicting their course, but it was harder than it sounded: particularly for someone with as structured and predictable a mind as Inyos.

The constant commentary from behind him hardly helped either; but a talkative and distracted gunner was better than no gunner at all, he supposed.

He couldn't help an offhand sarcastic comment, however. "Perhaps you should be thankful that we only have two droid fighters to deal with, and not an entire Imperial battle group."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

His erratic flying not only worsened her condition, but also made it increasingly more difficult to aim. For this the Lupine allowed a slightly more than rankled tone to color her voice.

"Mr. Aaamoran," she ground out between clenched teeth, "... your track record for making bad situations worse is fantastic enough as it is. If you could - "

s'Il fired off a few more shots, then grasped at her armrest with one hand as she felt her stomach flip in on itself.

" - if you could please refrain from making mention of more possible obstacles and trouble, I would greatly appreciate it!"

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos wasn't entirely sure what it was in Loklorien's last rant that had done it, but she had managed to thoroughly get under his skin, and was now crawling around like an army of buzz droids intent on sabotaging every last one of his freying nerves.

He swung around in his chair, a definate snarl gracing his features. "Will you please -"

The end of his sentence was drowned out by noise. Detecting the briefest hesitation in the Emerald Knight's evasive flying, the droid fighters exploited their opportunity to pump crimson bolts of blaster energy into the shuttle's hind-parts. Power conduits overloaded and ruptured as the shields collapsed under the onslaught; it was only a mix of quick thinking and instinct that threw the shuttle into a crazed new tangle of dodges and rolls, and saved them from certain destruction.

Eyes firmly focused on flying - angry both at himself for succoming to irritation, and at Master s'Ilancy for being such a terrible copilot - he strained against the controls as the shuttle fell into the planet's gravity well, vibrating violently against the heat and friction as they entered the atmosphere.

"This could get interesting," he muttered, darkly.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

'Interesting' was not the choice of words that she would've chosen to use, but Inyos had spoken, and until they landed in relatively one piece, she would hold her tongue. Afterwards however she would be sure to give him every piece of her mind that she saw fit - starting with his less-than-lovely brand of 'luck'.

Of course, the more pressing matter of the planet's gravity taking hold - and its' affects on her stomach - now occupied her thoughts completely. She felt as though her guts were being twisted in on themselves, and the Lupine clamped her jaws shut as her hands went out to steady herself against the most available piece of non-violently-shaking equipment.

She breathed through her nose, and in a last effort to maintain her dignity, s'Il let herself fall into as calm a meditation as she could muster. It helped, but only marginally, and the Jedi pushed herself back in her seat as the Knight dipped unexpectedly, sending her stomach plummeting to the bottom of her seat.

[Inyos Aamoran]

A siren began to wail in the cockpit - an automated subroutine put in place just in case anyone aboard hadn't noticed that they were hurtling towards a planet at high speed. With every klick they hurtled through, the flight controls began to shudder with increased fury - a feedback response designed to make the digital controls feel more like manual and mechanical inputs, but that currently made a controlled descent nigh impossible: at best, they were falling with style.

Their saving grace was the atmosphere. On many worlds, a thick atmosphere would have been even more devastating for the shuttle, as the denser air turned their durasteel hull into a fireball. On Helska IV the Knight was spared much of that; but a lack of friction meant a lack of decceleration, and even if they did somehow survive all the way to the ground, they wouldn't last long if the faster impact punctured the hull and vented their precious breathable air.

Somehow, Inyos managed to tilt the ship, aiming the repulsorlift generators towards the ground; not an easy task without an atmosphere for the shuttle's winglets to grab hold of.

The controls didn't seem to cope with it any better than Inyos' muscles: a shower of sparks errupted from the console, and pain blossomed in Inyos' hand.

The ground grew ever larger through the viewport window. Cradling his arm close to his body, Inyos turned to Master s'Ilancy, sadness filling his eyes.

"I'm sorry."

A moment later, the ground rose up to meet them. Silence fell.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Yet in that silence was the siren call of the Force.

The elder Lupine reached out with her thoughts and will in desperation, pulling the intangible toward herself and Inyos. If either had a chance to survive, only the Force would keep them in the land of the living. It would shield them, give them shelter from the maelstrom of disaster that was rising up to greet them with terrible ferocity.

She heard his voice, and though she could not see the saddened look in his eyes, his tone conveyed his regret to such a degree that she could feel it. She could smell it on him even. It was a tangible thing that she was unwilling to acknowledge.

No sorrow, she mouthed, twisting in her seat. Her arms lifted, fingers releasing the armrests as they reached for Inyos, and a split second before impact they met both sides of his face in an unbreakable grip.

We survive...

The Force blossomed around them both as the Lupine pulled upon her very essence, drawing everything in and channeling it out. It was a living shield, and she pulled Inyos into its' protective walls even as the horrific sounds of screeching metal twisted their way into the silence.

[Inyos Aamoran]

There was a proverb that drifted around the galaxy: no one knew where it had begun, but everyone knew what it said. It prophecised that when you were about to meet your end, your whole life would flash before your eyes. For some, it was a dance of happy memories - of warm emotions that reminded them of just how blessed they had been by life. For others, it was a tragic list of wasted opportunities and immoral acts: enough to shake those who lived into changing their ways, and remaking themselves for the better. For Inyos however, it was something different.

As the world around him literally ripped itself apart, the world inside did the same.

Memories cascaded - and while his most noble and most heinous acts all played out before his mind, they quickly drowned within the endless blackness of Ord Ithil. He did not feel pride or joy; nor did he feel fear or anger. Instead he felt an empty void: the black hole of wasted years that had been stolen from him by that terrible place. In his mind, all the good - and even all the bad - he had brought into the galaxy was undone, paled into insignificance by that world of never-ending night.

The shriek of the shuttle's hull buckling under the impact, and the thunderfall of snow as the surface they'd crashed into rained back down upon them cut through the sanctum of Force that Loklorien had surrounded them in. Silence tried to fall again, but the battered ship threw up a resistance, creaks and rumbles peppering the background as the Emerald Knight groaned in pain at it's injuries.

Inyos forced his eyes open; turned his attention to Master s'Ilancy; heard his lips utter: "Are you alright?" But his mind was elsewhere; distracted, addled.

There was another proverb that drifted the galaxy: every man has his demons to bear.

Inyos Aamoran's demons had just been shaken loose.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Her body and mind both had been battered to such an extent that she could utter nothing in response. With both of her hands still firm upon the sides of his face, she stared wide-eyed at his features, watched his lips move to form words. Words of inquiry. Words that she could not hear. Each muscle in her body screamed its' own rage and pain, but her own physical hurt paled in comparison to the great chasm that she'd felt ripped open within the man she now stared at.

Their world was slow in coming back to life - each grown and shudder of the Knight seemed as though it had become nothing but a stutter in time. A distant place that seemed so far away.

A small shower of snow fell between their two faces, having made its' way inside from the destroyed transparisteel cockpit viewshield.

She felt the first biting pangs of cold, but paid them no mind.

It seemed like an eternity that the two lay where they'd falled, side by side, facing each other, and s'Il's fingers twitched, digging ever so slightly more into Inyos' head.

"Where... " her voice came out in a whisper, strained and almost breathless as she fought for control of her own body, to keep from simply releasing him and curling into herself.

"Where have... where have you been... "

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos' emotional defenses closed him off instantly, but unlike the usual blast door protection that they offered, it felt more like he'd tried to slam a door in a rancor's face: try as he might, he couldn't force them completely closed.

"That's a long story," he grunted, his tone not quite as detached and precise as it normally was. "One better left for a time when we aren't in such imminent danger."

He moved a little, freeing himself from Lok's vice-grip on his skull, and felt a wave of pain radiate from his shoulder. He thought about applying his usual mental techniques to keep the sensation at bay, but instead he relished in it; if nothing else, the pain kept him distracted from the mental doorway that he couldn't quite close.

With a grunt, he heaved himself away from the floor. The cockpit sloped at an odd angle, which made clambering up to the controls all the more difficult. He managed - barely - wedging himself atop the twisted remains of what used to be a chair, his arm twisted at odd angles as he jabbed at keys and switches.

The console flickered, groaning and struggling to awaken like a reluctant child. Between the stuttering flashes of static across the scene, Inyos pieced together snatches of the bad news; an ever worsening list of systems failing, damaged, or powerless.

His fingers curled into a fist, and slammed into the transparisteel screen, adding a jagged crack to the display's disarray. He drew a breath to calm himself; it made little difference.

"We should get out of here," he uttered, his voice thready. "The air is too thin to survive long on the surface, but there are denser pockets beneath the ice. We'll need -" He stopped, pausing while he refilled his lungs as best he could. "- the life support gear we brought with us."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

His broken contact brought with it a jarring return to reality. What had seemed so distant was now imminent and demanding her attention. Every muscle screamed its' protest, and the sudden release of the Force - once so protecting - was a terrible fall for her mind. To be thrust so quickly back into the world of Helska IV made her groan. Her exertion had sapped her body, drained her mental strength, and left her a nearly empty shell capable only of doing its' best to recover.

Curling in on herself, the Lupine relegated herself to what oxygen she could breath in.

"Yes," she managed to gasp out between breaths.

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos clambered upwards towards the aft section, heaving himself awkwardly over the twisted wreckage. It took a few moments before he even remembered that the Force was there to assist him - a sure sign that the lack of oxygen was starting to have a detrimental effect.

Thoughts floated around his mind, leaking through the ajar mental door. He thought back to an airlock, decades ago, where Mandan Hidatsa's practiced flair with the Force had allowed him to manipulate the very electrons in the circuitry, and release the deadbolts holding it closed. Inyos had neither the precision nor the focus to perform anything with such finesse; instead he opted for a brute force approach, mixing muscle and mental powers to heave the hatch aside.

The aft section almost looked worse than the cockpit, if such a thing was possible. Crates of supplies, equipment, and spare parts that had been neatly stowed and secured had been shaken free, showering their contents everywhere. Ration packs had split and leaked; mixed with the scent of coolant and fuel, they smelt even less appetising than normal.

From the carnage he managed to snatch one of the life support boxes that they'd liberated from the pilots' stores. A few minutes of rummaging uncovered the second; the shattered casing and infrequent sparks suggested that it was in less than working order. With a grunt he floated the working unit downwards towards Loklorien, retrieving a rebreather mask for himself instead. It wouldn't help as much, or for as long, but it was better than nothing.

"Here," he called to s'Ilancy, adding a bundle of thick thermal gear to the equipment being sent her way. "Put these on - you'll need them."

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

With outstretched hands she grasped the small medical case, bringing it as close as she could to her body. A moment later her arm shot out once more to pull the thermal gear inward as well.

She sat up then, an awkward effort filled with protesting limbs, creaking joints, and a few groans - it was in no way graceful. Strands of hair fell into her face as she leaned forward to separate the upper and lower portions of the gear he'd given her, and slowly the Lupine began to pull the top on over her head. The trousers came next.

Getting to her feet proved a much more daunting task than the simple act of sitting up, but with dogged determination s'Il pulled herself up. With one hand grabbing at the edge of the console, she slowly rose to stand fully.

[Inyos Aamoran]

Inyos grabbed a few more handfuls of items that seemed potentially useful and vaguely intact, bundling them all into a slightly torn kit bag. Sealing it shut and dropping it down into the cockpit below, he allowed himself to follow, using the Force to cushion his defence... though not quite as much as he would have liked. Clearly, hypoxia was having a much bigger impact on his concentration than he was prepared to admit.

Retrieving his own set of thermals and beginning to hastily tug them on, he turned his gaze in s'Ilancy's direction. "Any damage?" he asked, giving her a quick visual once-over for any blood patches of protruding bones.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

"Nothing exceptionally horrible, no."

Standing carefully, she made sure her footing was solid before letting go of the console she was using for balance.

"The smaller scrapes and bruises will mend themselves well enough in short time," she gave a once-over around the small bridge, grimacing at the sight.

"Unfortunately I do not think that your ship is quite so lucky as us."

There was a faint undercurrent of concern lacing her words, as s'Il continued to sweep her gaze across the mechanical carnage before her.

"There is an emergency beacon aboard, yes?"