Chapter 5
The Ghost on the Scanner
The three of them sat in the relative warmth of the cave, the hum of the water recycler a lonely sound in the immense quiet. Zana had just returned from a final, fruitless sweep of the ship's engineering bay. She threw a useless scrap of wiring onto the dusty floor, her frustration a palpable energy in the small space.
"It's no good," she announced, her voice flat. "The conduit Kael needs isn't on that ship. I've stripped every non-essential system. Nothing matches."
Kael, who had been anxiously fiddling with the casing of the distress beacon, looked up. His ears drooped. "Then that's it. We can't regulate the power flow. The beacon is a paperweight."
A heavy silence fell over them. This was it, the end of the logical path. The end of Zana's pragmatic plans. They had shelter and a few days of rations, but they were just waiting for the power to die. It was a slow, quiet death sentence.
Jax looked from Zana's stony face to Kael's despairing one. His heart pounded. This was his moment. He had to guide them, and he had to do it without sounding like a madman. He cleared his throat.
"Maybe not," he said. The other two looked at him. "There might be one other option. A long shot."
Zana crossed her arms. "We're fresh out of options, archivist. If you have something, spit it out."
"When I was in the cockpit," Jax began, carefully choosing his words, building the lie on a foundation of truth. "After the crash, just before the main systems died completely, I was looking at the deep-range mineral scanner."
He paused, letting them lean in. "It was mostly static, but for a second, I thought I saw a flicker. A repeating energy signature. Faint, but regular. It seemed to be coming from deep underground, somewhere in this crater." He shrugged, trying to look like he didn't fully believe it himself. "I dismissed it as a sensor ghost from the impact. But… if the ship is a dead end, it's the only other anomalous thing on this entire rock."
He could feel it now, a subtle vibration in his mind. The pulse. He was using the memory of what he felt with the Force to build a logical argument.
Zana stared at him, her cybernetic eye whirring softly as she processed his words. "A ghost on a dying scanner. That's what you're offering us?"
"It's more than what we have now," Jax countered, his voice gaining strength. "Right now, our plan is to sit here and wait for the lights to go out. My plan is to check out a one-in-a-million long shot. It's a better plan."
He held her gaze. Kael looked between the two of them, a spark of hope warring with his fear. The cave was silent again, but this time it was a silence filled with calculation, not despair.
Finally, Zana let out a sharp, frustrated sigh. "Fine," she conceded, her voice tight. "Fine. We check out your ghost. But we do it my way. We gear up, we take supplies, and we use the ship's short-range sensors to try and get a lock on the direction you're talking about. The moment it looks like a wild goose chase, we turn back."
It was more than Jax could have hoped for. She wasn't just agreeing; she was making his lie more concrete, giving it a technological justification.
"Agreed," Jax said simply.
A new sense of purpose, however desperate, filled the small cave. Their survival no longer depended on salvaging the past, but on chasing a ghost into the unknown. A ghost that only Jax knew was real.
The cave, which had briefly felt like a sanctuary, was now a staging ground for a desperate expedition. The mood had shifted from one of grim acceptance to tense, focused purpose. Zana was in her element, her voice sharp and clear as she directed their preparations.
"Travel light, travel smart," she commanded, tossing a compact nutrition bar to Jax. "One water pack each. Full charge on your suit lights. Kael, your suit's power is at eighty percent; you'll be fine. Jax, double-check your seals. I don't want any surprises out there."
Jax obeyed, running the diagnostic on his suit's life support system. Everything showed green. He clipped the multi-tool to his belt and secured the small pack of supplies to his back. It felt like a minuscule offering against the vast, empty void waiting for them outside.
"Before we go wandering off on a ghost hunt," Zana said, picking up her heavy blaster pistol and checking its charge, "we confirm the heading."
They made their way back to the ship's cockpit one last time. It felt colder now, the last vestiges of residual power having bled away, leaving the screens dark and dead.
"It's no use," Kael said, his voice strained. "The main power is gone. I can't get a signal out of this thing."
"We're not using main power," Zana countered, pointing to one of the charged power cells they had salvaged. "We're going to hot-wire the short-range scanner directly. Give it one last jolt. Just enough for a sweep."
Kael looked doubtful but set to work, his nimble fingers prying open a new panel and rerouting conduits. Jax stood behind him, watching, but his real attention was turned inward. He closed his eyes and reached for the Force, for the steady, rhythmic pulse deep within the rock. It was still there. Thump… thump… thump… He knew the direction. He just needed the scanner to agree with him.
"I'm getting feedback," Kael muttered. "The power feed is unstable. The sensor dish is probably misaligned from the crash."
"Try rerouting the auxiliary feed through this junction," Jax suggested quietly, pointing to a small, overlooked port on the console. "Sometimes it creates a cleaner signal if the main bus is damaged." It was a guess, a lie cloaked in the technical jargon he'd picked up in his old job, but it was aimed at the direction he could feel the pulse coming from.
Kael, having no better ideas, complied. He rerouted the wire. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the scanner screen flickered to life, displaying a cascade of static.
"Come on, you piece of junk…" Zana whispered.
And then, for three glorious seconds, the static resolved. A crude, radial map of their immediate surroundings appeared. And at the very edge of the scanner's range, in the direction Jax had subtly guided them, a single, faint anomaly pulsed in time with the beat in his head.
ANOMALOUS & REPEATING ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED
Then the screen died, and the cockpit was plunged back into darkness.
Silence.
"Well, Jax," Zana said, her voice in the darkness holding a new note of grudging respect. "Your ghost is real. Let's go meet it."
Fifteen minutes later, they were three small, lonely figures trekking across the silent, gray dust of the crater. The wreck of The Vagrant shrank behind them, a monument to their failure. Ahead lay nothing but a landscape of shattered rock and razor-sharp shadows under a black sky. The only sounds were the soft crunch of their mag-boots in the lunar soil and the sound of their own breathing over the private comm channel.
Zana led the way, navigating with a handheld compass and her memory of the brief scanner reading. But Jax was navigating by a different map. The pulse was a metronome in his mind, a steady thump… thump… that grew infinitesimally stronger with every hundred meters they covered. It was a homing beacon only he could hear. It led them to the far side of the crater, to a place where the ground sloped downwards into a series of fractured, rocky chasms.
"The signal came from down there," Zana said, peering into the abyss. It was darker down there, a place the distant starlight did not fully reach.
Jax looked into the darkness, but his eyes were not his guide. He could feel it. The source of the pulse was somewhere in that maze of fractured rock below them. And it felt very, very old.
The descent into the chasm was slow and treacherous. The ground was a chaotic jumble of loose scree and sharp, crystalline rock formations. Their suit lights cut nervous, white cones into the oppressive darkness, revealing a maze of black stone and absolute shadow. The only sounds were the crunch of their boots, their measured breathing over the comms, and the occasional slide of dislodged rocks into the abyss below.
Zana, true to form, took the lead, her blaster pistol holstered in favor of a high-intensity plasma torch from her pack, which she used to test the stability of the ground ahead. Kael followed, his technical skills useless here, his movements clumsy and hesitant. Jax took the rear, his focus split. He was watching their path, but he was also listening with his other sense, following the steady, strengthening beat of the hidden pulse.
Thump… thump… thump… It was a lodestone, pulling him forward.
After twenty minutes of careful descent, they hit a dead end, a sheer wall of rock blocking their path.
"Damn it," Zana's voice crackled over the comms. "Wrong turn. We'll have to backtrack."
"Wait," Jax said, stalling. He closed his eyes for a second, letting the pulse guide him. It wasn't coming from in front of them; it was to their left, through a narrow, almost invisible fissure in the rock wall. He opened his eyes, searching for a logical reason. "Look," he said, pointing his light at the fissure. "The erosion patterns. They're different here. See how the dust settles? It suggests there might be an opening, a passage."
Zana moved her light over the area, her expression skeptical. "Looks like a crack in the rock to me."
"It's our only path forward that isn't backwards," Jax pressed.
She held his gaze for a long moment over the comm channel before giving a curt nod. "Fine. We try the crack. Kael, you're in the middle. Watch your footing."
The fissure was a tight squeeze, forcing them to move in single file. But just as Jax had felt, it opened up into another, wider canyon. And at the end of this canyon, they saw it.
It wasn't a cave. It was a door.
Or at least, it had been a door. Now it was mostly buried, a perfect, seamless semi-circle of dark, unblemished metal protruding from the rock face. It was ancient, clearly not part of the recent mining colony, its design elegant and alien. There were no visible handles, no keypads, no seams. In the center of the door was a single, intricate symbol: three interlocking circles with a single line running through their center. The rhythmic pulse Jax had been following was coming from directly behind it, a clear, steady beat he could feel in his teeth.
Kael approached it, pulling a scanner from his pack. "There's… there's a trickle of power running through it," he said, his voice full of awe. "On some kind of internal, closed system. But the lock… it's not electronic. It's not mechanical. I don't know what it is."
"So it's a wall," Zana said flatly, the disappointment evident in her voice. "A pretty wall. We've hit the end of the line."
But Jax felt something else. He remembered the carvings in the first cave, the figure with its hand outstretched. This wasn't a lock to be picked; it was a system to be communicated with. He stepped forward, his heart pounding.
"Jax, what are you doing?" Zana warned.
He didn't answer. He stood before the strange symbol and placed his gloved hand flat against its cool, metallic surface. He closed his eyes, ignoring the protests of his companions, and reached for the Force. He didn't try to push or pry. He simply focused his will, his entire consciousness, on his palm, and sent a silent pulse of focused intent through the metal, a simple query directed at the ancient lock. A greeting. I'm here.
For a second, nothing happened.
"Jax, we're done here," Zana said, her patience finally snapping. "Let's go."
Just as she spoke, a low thrum resonated up through the soles of Jax's boots. The symbol beneath his palm began to glow with a soft, white light. A deep, grinding shriek echoed through the canyon as dust and rock fell away from a previously invisible seam. With the sound of immense, thousand-year-old tumblers falling into place, the massive, semi-circular door began to retract into the rock wall.
It opened onto perfect, silent darkness, and the steady, welcoming hum of an ancient power finally unleashed.