Star Wars - Wrath of the Rebellion is now COMPLETED
- Thread starter Dr Midnight
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Dr Midnight
Explorer
He rejoined the group as they ran from the building. Zybor slashed every monitor and compu-station into hunks of worthless scrap on his way by. They sprinted down the streets of Tatooine. As they rounded a bend, they spotted the entire crew of stormtroopers running up the street… too far away. Too late. They jumped onto the Chandrila Surveyor and Dent fired it up. The ship was already in the sky when the stormtroopers burst into the hangar, firing harmless shots into the air after them.
The Surveyor made the jump into hyperspace.
During the day it took in hyperspace en route to Farlan-Eul in the mid rim, the group took stock of what they knew. They healed the few wounds they had, and tried to straighten the plan in their heads. Infiltrate Farlan-Eul, download the station plans to R5, escape, deliver the plans to Mon Mothma.
The ship's sub-light dampers came online. "Heads up," Dent announced sleepily. "We're coming out of hyperspace." The the group assembled outside the cockpit behind Dent, to see what they could. The stars melted back to single dots, and the ship lurched slightly. Realspace. They were in front of an immense asteroid cloud. The remains of Iroma Bsab floated for thousands of miles. They entered the cloud. A sound not unlike heavy rain on a tin roof echoed through the ship- small chunks of rock, about the size of training droids, were everywhere around them. They were pushed aside as the Chandrila Surveyor made its way through the cloud. They bounced off the hull in the hundreds.
Dent made a sensors system check, and found that his instruments were not responding. He wondered for a moment, then remembered reading something about sensors in the Holofile on the system. He picked his datapad up and read. "It seems that due to Iroma Bsab's metal-rich crust, almost all sensor functions are scrambled in the asteroid field. Only hyperspace transmissions are successful in entering and leaving the system."
"Great location for a secret base," the ever-perceptive Lexo remarked.
They drifted slowly through the debris of the shattered planet for a while, and found the dense cluster surrounding the core. It was a moon-sized chunk of dead stone, floating in space. No base was visible. No TIE fighters were on exercise through the system. It looked like… an asteroid.
"Which side of the asteroid is the base on, again?" Uschi asked.
Dent read from his datapad. "Hmm. The planet's core is hollow, I remember that much… Yes, the tunnels run through the core asteroid to its hollow center. This is where the base is housed." He paused, reading something else. "The asteroid is heavily defended. Laser outposts guard the entrances of the tunnels… but… only on one side." He blinked in surprise. "The entire dark side of the asteroid is undefended. Now, that's odd…"
"Probably one of those damned space slugs," T'ek said.
"Whatever the reason, I'm sure it's better than flying into a heavy laser field." Dent turned the ship and angled it around the asteroid. He then steered it back in. They flew towards the dark side of the asteroid. Its shape was visible only by the thin curve illuminated on one side by a distant sun. Dent did a search through his datapad on the dark side of the asteroid. He had to know why it was undefended. "It says here that the dark side is defenseless… out of an inability to destroy the Garstang, which has taken up residence there. What can 'the Garstang' be?"
"Space slug," T'ek repeated.
"I don't think so," Dent said. "Listen: 'All attempts to kill the Garstang have met with defeat. TIE maneuvers and Imperial efforts of any kind on this side of the asteroid are impossible, as the sound of sub-light drives and repulsor craft enrage it.' Doesn't sound like any space slug I've ever…"
"WHAT is THAT?" Uschi said, leaning forward, squinting her eyes. They all looked.
From the asteroid's pitch black center, something was moving. It had two shapeless wings that gracefully cut the air around it. It had a thickly muscled body. Its head was an obscene thing with four eyes, two immense horn-shaped ears, and a thousand tiny pointed teeth set in a very wide mouth. It was about two hundred meters wide, from wingtip to wingtip.
"That," Dent said wearily, "is the Garstang." He locked three buttons down, and leaned forward on the throttle. The Surveyor roared forward, its speed gaining as they headed straight towards the beast.
Lexo yelled "What are you doing?! That thing hates the sounds of engines- don't make it louder! It'll destroy us without a thought!""
"Easy, I know what I'm doing. R5, release escape pod 1." The droid bleeped and connected with the ship's computer. There was a hissing pop as one of the Surveyor's two escape pods released into space. Its auto-rockets came on and it flew away from the ship. Dent cut the engines… All of them. The entire ship turned off. The accelerated speed Dent had boosted them to pushed it quickly and silently through space, toward the asteroid. They were coasting, with no control at all. They watched the Garstang carefully.
The Garstang's immense ears pricked when it could no longer locate the sound of the ship. It screamed in fury, and a visible cone of concentric rings flew from its mouth. They looked like heat wave distortion. They shot past the coasting ship- the Surveyor shook from the sound waves emanating from the blast.
Zybor stretched his hand out. "Lexo, T'ek… help me." The three reached and concentrated on the Force. Woonwooken, Dent, and Uschi watched in astonishment as an asteroid that couldn't weigh less than 40,000 kilograms began to move… and then rocketed into the Garstang's path. The monster collided with the rock, and the impact was tremendous. A splintering crack, and the group sighed with relief. Perhaps the blow had killed the Garstang. No… there! It screamed again as it flew away from the rebounded asteroid. It was wounded… but barely. It flew towards them- and past them, as it angled towards the escape pod in its fury. Dent felt his hands twitch on the useless controls as they coasted towards Farlan-Eul at a speed he wasn't comfortable with, but couldn't do anything about just yet.
The Garstang shrieked out in space. Its sonic blast washed over the escape pod. Its rocket winked out. The pod then detonated against the side of a passing asteroid. Having nothing more to chase, the Garstang wheeled back around and flew to the core. Woonwooken grunted nervously.
"I know it's coming back… I know…" A bead of sweat dripped down Dent's brow. His hands hovered over the controls as the ship coasted straight towards the asteroid's surface. Suddenly, he punched the ignition button and wrenched the throttle. His left hand clicked four buttons on in the blink of an eye. The Chandrila Surveyor roared to life and veered away from the surface at the last second, angling into one of the core asteroid's several hundred tunnel entrances. The Garstang screamed behind them- it had been tricked, and it knew it. It beat its wings in pursuit… but it was too late. The ship shot down the slim tunnel, safely away from the beast.
The entire team sat down, their energy sapped by the tension. They flew through the tunnel for a few minutes before anyone spoke. When someone did, it was Dent. "The tunnel's thinning…" he said. If it keeps up like this before we reach the core, we'll have to find another way in." Woonwooken seemed to perk up, then walked away.
"Where're you going?" Lexo asked. Woonie growled back. "Whaddaya mean, you're going to widen the tunnel?" The wookiee didn't answer him this time. Out of the corner of his eye, Dent saw his turret light come on. Woonwooken was going to attempt to blast the tunnel wider. Dent cursed and quickly diverted power from the artillery batteries.
In the turret, Woonwooken leveled the Surveyor's big laser guns and pulled the trigger with a wookiee grin. Nothing happened. That weasely Darkstar human had ruined her fun! The giant furry scoundrel howled with displeasure, and ripped the turret controls right out of their housing assembly. She threw them on the ground and threw a wookiee tantrum, shaking her fists in the air.
Dent stopped the ship- it was pretty much impossible to go further down the tunnel, anyway. He ran up to the turret and saw his gun controls lying in a mangled wreck on the ship's floor. "YOU BIG FURRY IDIOT, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!? YOU'VE DESTROYED MY TURRET!!" Lexo ran up between them and petted Woonwooken's growling, slavering head soothingly.
"Uh, Dent? Might want to back off for a moment here," he said quickly.
"Back off nothing, do you know how long it's going to take me to fix this?!"
Lexo spoke in a calming voice, but his words spoke the warning clearly enough. "Do you know how long it will take you to fix it with no ARMS, Dent? Let me handle this." He petted the wookiee and spoke to her. Only he knew how to ease her raging… once it started, only one thing would stop it- the Shyriiwook lullaby Lexo had learned for this express purpose. He "sang" to her in a gruff series of barks, grunts and growls. He employed the Force and felt her mood turning from bright red murder to dull orange anger.
Dent stepped back and said "I want her in her bunkroom, locked in until I can fix this. Keep her out of my way." He got his tools out and went to work.
Lexo took Woonwooken's paw and led her away. "Ooookay, Woonie, come on now… time for nappies. There's a good girl."
Uschi, standing in the doorway, turned to T'ek and Zybor and whispered. "Now THAT… is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen."
It took Dent several hours to repair his ship. When he did, he stood up and wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. "Now, hopefully, we can move on." He walked by Woonwooken's bunk room on the way to the cockpit, and heard clinking sounds from within, against the door. Mournful wookiee yowls came from within. The grounded Woonwooken was trying to escape the locked room.
Zybor looked at him when he reentered the cockpit. "Dent, why can't we take the other escape pod through the remainder of the tunnel?"
"They're not really built for maneuvering… plus, it'll only hold so many of us. Better to just find another tunnel."
"You mean we're going BACK OUT?!"
"Yes… I'm afraid it's the only way. Don't worry. It'll be quick." Dent piloted his ship back through the tunnel and shot back into space. He pulled back on the controls and the ship swooped upward in a great U-turn. There was no sign of the Garstang. The ship angled back towards the asteroid, and Dent pointed to a tunnel. "That one's the biggest. We'll go through that one."
"That one is probably where that accursed flying monster lives!"
"I know, but it's also our best chance of reaching the asteroid's core with the ship. We'll take our chances." They flew into the hole, at a higher speed than Dent felt comfortable with. Suddenly, two hundred and fifty meters away, the ship's lights shone on the Garstang. It was indeed in this tunnel, and the Chandrila Surveyor's engines had driven it half-mad with bloodlust. It screamed as they shot towards it. Dent yanked on the controls and the ship barrel rolled to the left of the sonic blast, then arced up over the biting mouth. The ship flew just to the side of one ear, almost scraping it. Then, they were past.
The Garstang didn't dare follow them further inside… its size meant it could only travel so far. The ship drifted through the asteroid's rocky tunnel, and eventually a light was shining, far before them. "That's it," Dent said. He cut the lights and pulled the ship up to the hole, where they looked in.
The inside of the asteroid's core was almost an inverted planet in itself. The hollow space was a huge, almost perfectly spherical pocket where rock and debris had been cleared out. Hundreds of tunnel-holes dotted the interior landscape. Between the tunnel holes of the core walls, small, even holes pitted every surface. It was almost like a man-made mesh pattern in the stone. Blast-glass tunnels ran for hundreds of meters from the openings of the rock tunnels to the center of the sphere's shape- the core's core. It was a dense wad of metal, roughly a kilometer in diameter. Ships and transports docked at it, TIE fighters buzzed around it like flies.
A sensor light winked on, to Dent's surprise. "Atmosphere. We can breathe outside the ship now. All gravity is oriented towards that central mass."
"Great, let's go," T'ek said. "I'm rather tired of just sitting around."
"Not so fast," Dent replied. "We don't have a plan."
R5-F6 tweeted and turned his head back and forth, watching the warriors with interest as they formed a plan to infiltrate the secret Imperial base.
NEXT TIME: THE PLAN
The Surveyor made the jump into hyperspace.
During the day it took in hyperspace en route to Farlan-Eul in the mid rim, the group took stock of what they knew. They healed the few wounds they had, and tried to straighten the plan in their heads. Infiltrate Farlan-Eul, download the station plans to R5, escape, deliver the plans to Mon Mothma.
The ship's sub-light dampers came online. "Heads up," Dent announced sleepily. "We're coming out of hyperspace." The the group assembled outside the cockpit behind Dent, to see what they could. The stars melted back to single dots, and the ship lurched slightly. Realspace. They were in front of an immense asteroid cloud. The remains of Iroma Bsab floated for thousands of miles. They entered the cloud. A sound not unlike heavy rain on a tin roof echoed through the ship- small chunks of rock, about the size of training droids, were everywhere around them. They were pushed aside as the Chandrila Surveyor made its way through the cloud. They bounced off the hull in the hundreds.
Dent made a sensors system check, and found that his instruments were not responding. He wondered for a moment, then remembered reading something about sensors in the Holofile on the system. He picked his datapad up and read. "It seems that due to Iroma Bsab's metal-rich crust, almost all sensor functions are scrambled in the asteroid field. Only hyperspace transmissions are successful in entering and leaving the system."
"Great location for a secret base," the ever-perceptive Lexo remarked.
They drifted slowly through the debris of the shattered planet for a while, and found the dense cluster surrounding the core. It was a moon-sized chunk of dead stone, floating in space. No base was visible. No TIE fighters were on exercise through the system. It looked like… an asteroid.
"Which side of the asteroid is the base on, again?" Uschi asked.
Dent read from his datapad. "Hmm. The planet's core is hollow, I remember that much… Yes, the tunnels run through the core asteroid to its hollow center. This is where the base is housed." He paused, reading something else. "The asteroid is heavily defended. Laser outposts guard the entrances of the tunnels… but… only on one side." He blinked in surprise. "The entire dark side of the asteroid is undefended. Now, that's odd…"
"Probably one of those damned space slugs," T'ek said.
"Whatever the reason, I'm sure it's better than flying into a heavy laser field." Dent turned the ship and angled it around the asteroid. He then steered it back in. They flew towards the dark side of the asteroid. Its shape was visible only by the thin curve illuminated on one side by a distant sun. Dent did a search through his datapad on the dark side of the asteroid. He had to know why it was undefended. "It says here that the dark side is defenseless… out of an inability to destroy the Garstang, which has taken up residence there. What can 'the Garstang' be?"
"Space slug," T'ek repeated.
"I don't think so," Dent said. "Listen: 'All attempts to kill the Garstang have met with defeat. TIE maneuvers and Imperial efforts of any kind on this side of the asteroid are impossible, as the sound of sub-light drives and repulsor craft enrage it.' Doesn't sound like any space slug I've ever…"
"WHAT is THAT?" Uschi said, leaning forward, squinting her eyes. They all looked.
From the asteroid's pitch black center, something was moving. It had two shapeless wings that gracefully cut the air around it. It had a thickly muscled body. Its head was an obscene thing with four eyes, two immense horn-shaped ears, and a thousand tiny pointed teeth set in a very wide mouth. It was about two hundred meters wide, from wingtip to wingtip.
"That," Dent said wearily, "is the Garstang." He locked three buttons down, and leaned forward on the throttle. The Surveyor roared forward, its speed gaining as they headed straight towards the beast.
Lexo yelled "What are you doing?! That thing hates the sounds of engines- don't make it louder! It'll destroy us without a thought!""
"Easy, I know what I'm doing. R5, release escape pod 1." The droid bleeped and connected with the ship's computer. There was a hissing pop as one of the Surveyor's two escape pods released into space. Its auto-rockets came on and it flew away from the ship. Dent cut the engines… All of them. The entire ship turned off. The accelerated speed Dent had boosted them to pushed it quickly and silently through space, toward the asteroid. They were coasting, with no control at all. They watched the Garstang carefully.
The Garstang's immense ears pricked when it could no longer locate the sound of the ship. It screamed in fury, and a visible cone of concentric rings flew from its mouth. They looked like heat wave distortion. They shot past the coasting ship- the Surveyor shook from the sound waves emanating from the blast.
Zybor stretched his hand out. "Lexo, T'ek… help me." The three reached and concentrated on the Force. Woonwooken, Dent, and Uschi watched in astonishment as an asteroid that couldn't weigh less than 40,000 kilograms began to move… and then rocketed into the Garstang's path. The monster collided with the rock, and the impact was tremendous. A splintering crack, and the group sighed with relief. Perhaps the blow had killed the Garstang. No… there! It screamed again as it flew away from the rebounded asteroid. It was wounded… but barely. It flew towards them- and past them, as it angled towards the escape pod in its fury. Dent felt his hands twitch on the useless controls as they coasted towards Farlan-Eul at a speed he wasn't comfortable with, but couldn't do anything about just yet.
The Garstang shrieked out in space. Its sonic blast washed over the escape pod. Its rocket winked out. The pod then detonated against the side of a passing asteroid. Having nothing more to chase, the Garstang wheeled back around and flew to the core. Woonwooken grunted nervously.
"I know it's coming back… I know…" A bead of sweat dripped down Dent's brow. His hands hovered over the controls as the ship coasted straight towards the asteroid's surface. Suddenly, he punched the ignition button and wrenched the throttle. His left hand clicked four buttons on in the blink of an eye. The Chandrila Surveyor roared to life and veered away from the surface at the last second, angling into one of the core asteroid's several hundred tunnel entrances. The Garstang screamed behind them- it had been tricked, and it knew it. It beat its wings in pursuit… but it was too late. The ship shot down the slim tunnel, safely away from the beast.
The entire team sat down, their energy sapped by the tension. They flew through the tunnel for a few minutes before anyone spoke. When someone did, it was Dent. "The tunnel's thinning…" he said. If it keeps up like this before we reach the core, we'll have to find another way in." Woonwooken seemed to perk up, then walked away.
"Where're you going?" Lexo asked. Woonie growled back. "Whaddaya mean, you're going to widen the tunnel?" The wookiee didn't answer him this time. Out of the corner of his eye, Dent saw his turret light come on. Woonwooken was going to attempt to blast the tunnel wider. Dent cursed and quickly diverted power from the artillery batteries.
In the turret, Woonwooken leveled the Surveyor's big laser guns and pulled the trigger with a wookiee grin. Nothing happened. That weasely Darkstar human had ruined her fun! The giant furry scoundrel howled with displeasure, and ripped the turret controls right out of their housing assembly. She threw them on the ground and threw a wookiee tantrum, shaking her fists in the air.
Dent stopped the ship- it was pretty much impossible to go further down the tunnel, anyway. He ran up to the turret and saw his gun controls lying in a mangled wreck on the ship's floor. "YOU BIG FURRY IDIOT, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!? YOU'VE DESTROYED MY TURRET!!" Lexo ran up between them and petted Woonwooken's growling, slavering head soothingly.
"Uh, Dent? Might want to back off for a moment here," he said quickly.
"Back off nothing, do you know how long it's going to take me to fix this?!"
Lexo spoke in a calming voice, but his words spoke the warning clearly enough. "Do you know how long it will take you to fix it with no ARMS, Dent? Let me handle this." He petted the wookiee and spoke to her. Only he knew how to ease her raging… once it started, only one thing would stop it- the Shyriiwook lullaby Lexo had learned for this express purpose. He "sang" to her in a gruff series of barks, grunts and growls. He employed the Force and felt her mood turning from bright red murder to dull orange anger.
Dent stepped back and said "I want her in her bunkroom, locked in until I can fix this. Keep her out of my way." He got his tools out and went to work.
Lexo took Woonwooken's paw and led her away. "Ooookay, Woonie, come on now… time for nappies. There's a good girl."
Uschi, standing in the doorway, turned to T'ek and Zybor and whispered. "Now THAT… is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen."
It took Dent several hours to repair his ship. When he did, he stood up and wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. "Now, hopefully, we can move on." He walked by Woonwooken's bunk room on the way to the cockpit, and heard clinking sounds from within, against the door. Mournful wookiee yowls came from within. The grounded Woonwooken was trying to escape the locked room.
Zybor looked at him when he reentered the cockpit. "Dent, why can't we take the other escape pod through the remainder of the tunnel?"
"They're not really built for maneuvering… plus, it'll only hold so many of us. Better to just find another tunnel."
"You mean we're going BACK OUT?!"
"Yes… I'm afraid it's the only way. Don't worry. It'll be quick." Dent piloted his ship back through the tunnel and shot back into space. He pulled back on the controls and the ship swooped upward in a great U-turn. There was no sign of the Garstang. The ship angled back towards the asteroid, and Dent pointed to a tunnel. "That one's the biggest. We'll go through that one."
"That one is probably where that accursed flying monster lives!"
"I know, but it's also our best chance of reaching the asteroid's core with the ship. We'll take our chances." They flew into the hole, at a higher speed than Dent felt comfortable with. Suddenly, two hundred and fifty meters away, the ship's lights shone on the Garstang. It was indeed in this tunnel, and the Chandrila Surveyor's engines had driven it half-mad with bloodlust. It screamed as they shot towards it. Dent yanked on the controls and the ship barrel rolled to the left of the sonic blast, then arced up over the biting mouth. The ship flew just to the side of one ear, almost scraping it. Then, they were past.
The Garstang didn't dare follow them further inside… its size meant it could only travel so far. The ship drifted through the asteroid's rocky tunnel, and eventually a light was shining, far before them. "That's it," Dent said. He cut the lights and pulled the ship up to the hole, where they looked in.
The inside of the asteroid's core was almost an inverted planet in itself. The hollow space was a huge, almost perfectly spherical pocket where rock and debris had been cleared out. Hundreds of tunnel-holes dotted the interior landscape. Between the tunnel holes of the core walls, small, even holes pitted every surface. It was almost like a man-made mesh pattern in the stone. Blast-glass tunnels ran for hundreds of meters from the openings of the rock tunnels to the center of the sphere's shape- the core's core. It was a dense wad of metal, roughly a kilometer in diameter. Ships and transports docked at it, TIE fighters buzzed around it like flies.
A sensor light winked on, to Dent's surprise. "Atmosphere. We can breathe outside the ship now. All gravity is oriented towards that central mass."
"Great, let's go," T'ek said. "I'm rather tired of just sitting around."
"Not so fast," Dent replied. "We don't have a plan."
R5-F6 tweeted and turned his head back and forth, watching the warriors with interest as they formed a plan to infiltrate the secret Imperial base.
NEXT TIME: THE PLAN
Last edited:
Hammerhead
Explorer
[Calvin]
Bats: the Big, Giant, Bug Scourge of the Stars!
[/Calvin]
Bats: the Big, Giant, Bug Scourge of the Stars!
[/Calvin]
Breakstone
First Post
Woah... Garstang...
Say, Doc, was the Garstang in the Star Wars d20 book or did you make it up yourself?
Say, Doc, was the Garstang in the Star Wars d20 book or did you make it up yourself?
Rel
Liquid Awesome
Loved the Giant Space Bat and all, but my absolute favorite had to be:
One of the things I like most about this Story Hour is the characters dialog. Most of it sounds like it could easily have come out of the movies. Now, I could never in a million parsecs picture Han Solo telling Chewbacca "time for nappies" but somehow that line was still the cherry on top of the whole "update sundae".
Great work, Dr. M.
Dr Midnight said:
One of the things I like most about this Story Hour is the characters dialog. Most of it sounds like it could easily have come out of the movies. Now, I could never in a million parsecs picture Han Solo telling Chewbacca "time for nappies" but somehow that line was still the cherry on top of the whole "update sundae".
Great work, Dr. M.
KidCthulhu
First Post
Wow, do I love Woonie. I wanna be a wookie in a stormtrooper hat and bow.
Greg Dickens
First Post
What happen to the website link for this Story Hour. I can't find it anywhere. Could you please post this again.
