“Immortal Devotion: The Spiral” – Chapter 1 (1/1)

Things could never just go right, could they?

That phrase felt like it had become Coran’s mantra these days. But it was true; a run could never just go off without a hitch, even once. This was only Coran J’Bari-Kai third official smuggling run in his so far short career, and it was the first one without the guidance of his mother, nor the assistance of an astromech. Since childhood, the only thing Coran ever wanted to do was live up to Kira J’bari’s legacy, and today was definitely not a good start.

Unlike his pacifist of a father, Coran’s mother was renowned in their home sector as being a part-time bounty hunter, full-time smuggler. The reason his parents even actually ended up together always eluded him.

Regardless, she was a local hero of sorts who tried to gave back to her family and her community through the spoils of her legendary ventures. The Hutts praised her fervently, and the Outer Rim Marshals despised her to the same degree. He still remembered flying with her when she made her last journey to Corellia. Oh, the adventures they could have gone on together if only…

Coran was snapped back into reality as the clattering of dozens of metallic feet drew closer behind him. You would think he was being pursued by an army of belligerent droids, but in fact, there were only two.

These mechanical monstrosities were the result of some horrific experiment gone wrong on a long forgotten planet, resulting in a world of millions of droids constantly upgrading and modifying themselves with any and every piece of machinery and scrap metal they could find. And two of those droids, plucked right from the heart of that mechanical nightmare, were supposed to be his confidential cargo. They were supposed to be harmless. And they were supposed to be deactivated. But clearly, they were not.

One droid, appearing to be a modified Separatist “barrel droid” at it’s base, crawled around like a massive arachnid Wyyyschokk, while the other, more unidentifiable abomination, closely resembled a long centipede-like creature. Both were armed with claw like appendages, angled razors welded to every joint, and one had acquired a rotary saw somewhere along the way.

Coran had not even gotten the chance to transfer them from the cargo hold of the expansive Magistra-class mobile platform he was currently docked in to his own personal transport, the Devotion, before they were accidentally activated by some idiot crewmate and sent on a bloody rampage. A rampage that had resulted in the instantaneous death of the space station’s wealthy proprietor, and his client, a Mr. Marco Cale.

As Coran rounded a corner, he flew straight into a stack of crates. An assortment of mechanical parts and metal shards went flying everywhere, and he struggled not to land on a face-up handheld pile driver or rusty spike as he lost complete control of his balance. Quickly able to recover and spring to his feet, Coran realized two of the station’s remaining crew members had created a barricade of containers and were waiting for the droids, blasters in hand. He saw fear consuming both of the men’s faces, and their hands were trembling so much that their weapons were audibly rattling.

For a fleeting moment, he felt pity for the men and considered staying to help them fight their way through the sentient piles of malicious machinery. However, that thought quickly passed as he realized his ship was in the hangar just beyond the next door. He patted one of the frightened men on the shoulder for luck and took off down the hall.

As he reached the closed door he heard one of the droids round the corner, followed by the zizzing sound of a buzz saw fire up. He typed into the keypad as fast as he could, trying to remember the universal override passcode for most late Republic-era stations and cruisers that his mother had taught him. It took only three or four panicked attempts to successfully input the sequence, and as the door slip open, Coran heard one of the men yell in a language he was unfamiliar with followed by a single blaster bolt ringing out. As the door closed behind him, his ears caught the sound of the saw tearing through flesh and sinew, and the screams of the two men went abruptly silent.

He just needed to make it to his ship.

As Coran raced across the hangar towards the Devotion, he heard the door explode behind him and the metallic clanking of claws and appendages grew near at an alarming rate. He could hear the hollow, thudding sound of the once solid body of the barrel droid dragging on the ground, and knew that the spider-like amalgamation was right on his heels.

But where had the long one gone?

He looked left and right, making sure it hadn’t taken a shortcut and beaten him to the hangar, stopping himself from looking too far over his shoulder and finding out just how close his other pursuer was.

His stride remained nearly unbroken as he quickly waved his hand over the control pad on the side of his ship, and the boarding ramp began to lower at a rate much too slow for Coran’s liking. He hoisted himself up into the ship before it had even gotten a chance to open half way, and scanned his hand on the other side, rapidly reversing the ramp’s trajectory. The droid slammed into the hull of the Devotion as the door sealed shut, and Coran cursed under his breath as he ran down the hall toward the cockpit.

A freighter the size of the Devotion would normally require a crew of at least a dozen men, and could technically house over twenty lifeforms comfortably. However, at the moment, the crew consisted of Coran and Coran alone. And he was feeling the full brunt of having to do everything by himself, and knew things would need to change if and when he made it out of this alive. A bona fide crew was a must, apparently.

He made it to the cockpit and fired up the engine as he looked out the viewport. It took him only a fraction of a moment to realize that the second, centipede-like droid had attached itself to the other side of his ship. It had drilled multiple of its accretions into the side of the Devotion’s hull, and was now attempting to compromise the outer shell and penetrate the ship in whatever compartments it could.

Coran had had about enough of this mechanical freak show, and he manually unlocked the lower gunner stations as he took off back towards the rear of the ship. Fortunately for Coran, below the Devotion’s living level and service deck, there were two turret compartments giving way to powerful twin blaster cannons.

As Coran slid down the ladder and past the narrow duct leading to the maintenance floor, not touching a single rung on the way down, he swore to himself that at the very least he needed to find a good first mate who could operate the guns while he got the ship off the ground, or even just a co-pilot who could fly while he did the shooting. But of course, the ability to do so would all depended upon the next few crucial moments.

As he heard the grinding sound of saw on metal, he swung the right side turret around and aimed it straight at the large “abdomen” of the monstrous droid. With the swift pull of a trigger and and a sharp exhale, it erupted into a steel volcano of oil and mismatched parts.

Coran wanted to keep shooting at the still moving chunks of the horrifying monstrosity of a droid that had damaged his prized ship, however, he had another pressing problem to deal with. As he swiftly flew back up the ladder, he could hear the hissing of systems, pipes, and wires being cut through and destroyed. He ran around the corner to the other ladder that led to the lower left-side turret bubble opposite the one he had just occupied and quickly scurried down.

However, as he reached the small, transparent compartment, he realized that the droid had completely wrapped itself around the entire left portion of the ship and the turret was completely jammed by an abundance of writhing droid parts. If he fired now, everything would quite literally blow up in his face.

Coran had to think fast, and kept moving as he did so. He remember something his mother had done years ago, when she had been marauding near the Maw. A giant Mynock had latched onto the hull of her ship, and she had made a quick jump into hyperspace to burn it off. He knew that this strategy could work with living creatures, but because his attacker was made of metal, he wasn’t sure whether or not if the droid would be able to withstand hyperspeed similar to the hull of his ship. If he made the wrong choice, he could very well be trapped in hyperspace while his ship continued to be punctured and constricted until it ultimately popped, its lone occupant flung into the void between time and space.

Regardless, he didn’t have another plan, and if he didn’t act soon it wouldn’t matter. He knew no blaster he currently stored aboard the Devotion had the capacity to damage the giant droid should it make its way on board.

It was now or never.

Coran made his way back into the cockpit just as he saw the forward-facing cannons go offline. He could hear the tendrils of the giant droid now blindly banging around inside the halls of his ship. If he didn’t hurry, the droid would punch a hole so big into his vessel that he’d lose life support and be sucked out mid-jump.

He turned on the navcomputer and furiously typed away. He didn’t need a defined destination; in fact, quite the opposite. He needed a piece of space where there was nothing. No planet, no sun, no space station, ship, or fleet, nothing that he could potentially collide with upon exiting hyperspace. And it appeared that he found one relatively close by.

The son of Kira J’bari, smuggler among smugglers and pilot among pilots, closed his eyes and prayed that he wouldn’t collide with an object that happened to be sitting at these exact coordinates at this exact time. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and with that, he pushed the final lever forward.