Chapter 3: The Price of Knowledge
The single credit chip felt heavy in Jax's palm, a small anchor of reality. He stood outside the hangar, the roar of the port at his back, and stared at the flickering sign for the Dust Devil Flophouse.
'A bunk,' he thought, the idea a siren's song. 'A locked door. God, that sounds good. A few hours where I don't have to worry about something trying to eat me or steal my boots.'
He pictured it: a lumpy mattress, four walls, and the simple, profound luxury of being safe. He could afford it. He had earned it. But his gaze drifted down to the coin in his hand.
'And then what? I wake up, and I'm back at zero tomorrow. No.' The logic was cold and sharp. 'This point is worth more than one night's sleep.'
He clenched his fist around the chip and turned his back on the flophouse, heading for the familiar shadows of the alleyways. "One down," he muttered under his breath, the words tasting like rust and resolve. "Nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine to go. Let's not make it any harder."
The next day's work was just as brutal. And the day after that. But something had shifted in Jax. He was no longer just a survivor enduring the work; he was a spy, a reconnaissance pilot on a mission. During every brief pause, his eyes were glued to the freighters. He watched the pilots in their cockpits, hands moving over glowing consoles, casually flicking switches and adjusting levers.
'What does that switch do?' he wondered, his frustration a constant, burning coal in his gut. 'Is that for the landing struts? Or the inertial dampeners? What the hell are inertial dampeners, anyway?' He could see the results—a smooth landing, a powerful takeoff—but the process was a complete black box. The ignorance was maddening. It was like being a master surgeon and only being allowed to mop the hospital floors.
This frustration came to a head during a break. He sat on a crate, chewing a tasteless ration bar, watching a pilot swagger down a ship's ramp. The man couldn't have been much older than him, but he walked like he owned the stars. 'I could fly that ship better than him. I know I could. But I can't even turn it on.'
The thought sparked an idea. He had a supercomputer in his head. A direct line to... somewhere. It had gear, weapons. Why not information?
'Okay, this thing has everything, right?' he thought, finding a secluded spot behind a stack of containers. He focused on the blue System icon in his vision. 'It has to have information. It just has to.'
The Shop interface bloomed in his mind. He ignored the flashy icons for blasters and artifacts and found a simple search bar. He thought of the terms, clear and direct. Pilot manual. Freighter controls. How to fly starship.
A list populated. Most of it was complex, military-grade software costing millions. But then, near the bottom, he saw it. A simple, unassuming entry.
Title: Primer for Light Freighter Operation (Class YT & Ghtroc).
Type: Knowledge Download.
A surge of pure, undiluted hope shot through him. 'There it is. Holy shit, there it is.' For a second, he felt like he'd won. Then he saw the price.
Cost: 25 Points.
The hope didn't vanish. It solidified into cold, hard math. 'Twenty-five points,' he calculated. 'Twenty-five days of this... this hell. Twenty-four more shifts from hell.' He weighed the cost—the aching back, the humiliation, the sheer, mind-numbing grind—against the prize. It was the key. It was the only way out of this pit.
He let out a slow breath, his mind made up. The abstract goal of ten million was a fantasy. But twenty-five? Twenty-five was a mission objective.
'Okay. That's the mission, then,' he thought, a grim smile touching his lips. 'Survive this for twenty-four more days, and you get to be a pilot again.' He stood up, his body protesting, and walked back toward his workstation. His steps felt lighter. The work was still hell, but now, it had a purpose.
The morning of the fourth day began with a new and immediate crisis. Jax's hand, searching the bottom of the ration pouch, came up empty. He had known this moment was coming, but the finality of it landed like a stone in his gut. His stomach, already aching from the previous day's labor, growled in protest.
He focused on the System HUD. His balance was 3 POINTS. He could open the shop, buy another three days of tasteless, but life-sustaining, rations. It would be easy. But the image of the pilot's manual, and its price of twenty-five points, burned in his mind.
'No,' he thought, the decision hardening his jaw. 'I'm not spending a single point until I hit twenty-five. There has to be another way.'
That night, a new, humiliating step was added to his routine. After the shift, he didn't retreat to his alley to rest. He waited, his stomach a hollow, aching void, until the Port Anteris sleep-cycle was at its deepest and darkest. He found the alley behind the Jundland Wastes Cantina. The stench of stale drink and alien refuse was overpowering. He had to kick at a pair of small, rat-like skags to scare them away from a leaking container.
His hands, which had once guided a billion-dollar aircraft through the stratosphere, now sifted through garbage. The shame was a physical, choking thing. But the hunger was worse. He found what he was looking for: the discarded half of a strange, purple fruit, and a tough, half-eaten piece of roasted meat on a skewer.
He retreated to the shadows, his heart pounding. 'Just swallow it,' he told himself, forcing the food into his mouth. 'It's fuel. That's all it is. Fuel for one more day.'
And so the true rhythm of his life began. Wake, drink, scavenge, work, collect one demeaning credit, and sleep. The work hardened his hands into calloused claws; the hunger sharpened the edges of his cheekbones.
"Still here, new blood?" Pim asked him during the second week, giving him a long, knowing look. "Thought the hunger would've chased you off by now. A single credit don't buy much grub."
"I manage," Jax said, his voice flat. He didn't elaborate. Pim, a survivor himself, didn't ask.
The countdown in his head was now the only thing that mattered. It was a drumbeat that kept him moving through the pain and the humiliation.
'Twelve down. Thirteen to go. Halfway there,' he'd think, the gnawing in his belly a constant reminder of the price.
During the third week, he found a new level of exhaustion. The poor nutrition was catching up to him, making the work a monumental effort of will. But his resolve didn't waver. His movements with the grav-lifter became ruthlessly efficient, saving him precious energy.
Pim noticed. "You learn fast," the old alien remarked one cycle. "And you run lean. Cheaper that way, eh?"
It was the closest either of them came to acknowledging Jax's grim nightly ritual.
On the eve of the final day, Jax clutched his 24th credit. He was filthy, thinner than he'd been since basic training, and bone-weary. But as he looked at the coin, he didn't just see the day's labor. He saw twenty-one nights of forcing down garbage, of fighting off vermin, of swallowing his pilot's pride.
'Twenty-four,' he thought, a flicker of triumph cutting through the exhaustion. 'One more day. One more day, and I buy the key.' He settled into his alley, the hunger a familiar friend now, and waited for the twin suns to rise one last time on his trial.
The final shift felt different. A strange, electric energy hummed beneath Jax's exhaustion, a counter-rhythm to the dull ache in his muscles. He worked with a clean, focused ferocity, his movements precise, his mind clear. The hangar's roar, the foreman's bellowing, the constant threat of being crushed or dismembered—it all faded into a distant background noise. There was only the work, and the end of it.
When the final klaxon blared, he felt no relief, only anticipation. He joined the line, his back straight, his eyes fixed on Grakk. The hulking foreman made his demeaning rounds, tossing the coins into the dust. This time, when the chip clinked at Jax's feet, there was no sting of humiliation. It was just a final piece of a puzzle falling into place. He bent, picked it up, and walked away without a backward glance.
He found his secluded spot behind a stack of coolant containers, the air humming with the thrum of machinery. He sat down, his back against the cold metal, and opened his palm, looking at the twenty-five greasy credit chips.
'This is it,' he thought, the reality of the moment sinking in. 'Twenty-five days of this hell. Twenty-one nights of eating food I wouldn't have fed to a stray dog back home.' He remembered the shame of that first night, his stomach twisting with hunger, forcing himself to eat garbage that even the skags had passed over. He had endured it all. For this. For the number twenty-five.
He closed his eyes, the physical coins forgotten. He focused inward, on the cool, clean interface of the System.
BALANCE: 25 POINTS.
With a will forged in filth and fire, he navigated to the Shop, to the Primer for Light Freighter Operation. The prompt appeared in his vision, simple and stark.
Confirm Purchase: 25 Points.
'Do it,' he thought, the command as sharp and final as a gunshot.
He expected a headache, a flash of light, something. Instead, it was like a dam breaking in his mind. Information, pure and dense, flooded his consciousness. It wasn't like reading a book; it was like having a library injected directly into his soul.
Schematics for a Kuat Drive Yards hyperdrive blossomed behind his eyes. He understood coolant flows, the precise energy modulation needed to enter hyperspace without atomizing the ship. The startup sequence for a Ghtroc 720's power core laid itself bare, from energizing the particle accelerator to achieving stable plasma injection. He suddenly knew the distinct flicker of a failing inertial dampener, the subtle drag of a misaligned stabilizer, the difference between a Class 1 and a Class 2 hyperdrive.
It was a torrent, a revelation. He saw the controls from the cockpits he had only glimpsed, but now he knew their function. That red lever wasn't just a lever; it was the emergency heat sink flush. The bank of yellow lights wasn't just decoration; it was the power distribution monitor for the shields.
The flood slowed, then settled. The knowledge didn't feel foreign. It felt like it had been there all along, a locked room in his mind for which he had just been given the key.
Jax opened his eyes.
The hangar was the same, but he saw it with a clarity that was almost painful. The chaos now had an underlying order. The ships were no longer mysterious metal beasts; they were systems, engines, and hulls, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. His gaze swept across the hangar floor and settled on the old, beat-up Corellian freighter belonging to the captain the other pilots called Valerius.
Before, it was junk. Now, he saw it all. The slight droop in the starboard landing strut, indicating a hydraulic leak. The scorch patterns around the exhaust ports, a clear sign of a sub-optimal fuel mixture. The barely-perceptible flicker in the cockpit's external lights, a symptom of a faulty power converter. He knew what was wrong with it. And he knew, with absolute certainty, that he could fix it. That he could fly it better than anyone.
A slow, genuine smile spread across his face. It wasn't a smile of relief or happiness. It was the sharp, confident smile of a predator who had just regrown its teeth. The scroll had been read. The hunt for a pilot's seat could now begin.