"Rendezvous Point Omicron Delta" was actually a deserted asteroid mining facility which Dianna's father had purchased many years ago for emergency purposes, such as this. In the past several years the facility hadn't been touched and had probably been forgotten by even the original mining corporation which had built the facility, if it was even still in existence.
Dianna's father had purchased the facility through a front corporation under a fake name, and then let the "company" go out of business. For all intents and purposes the facility was abandoned, unowned, and forgotten about years ago.
The chances of it even being discovered was slim as the system it was located in was not only off the beaten path, but contained no habitable planets, or at least not habitable to any known sentient life form. The system didn't even have a name, only an alpha-numeric designation for mapping purposes. There was no imaginable reason a ship might exit hyperspace here, but here was the Jet Razor, cruising along the edge of the unamed system's asteroid belt as it had been for several hours now.
"Omicron Delta, this is Jet Razor. Do you copy?" Raezyr spoke into the comm for what seemed like the hundredth time, but had yet to receive an answer. The Sith brothers had never really bothered to get an exact location of the facility. They had never really ever expected to have a reason to stop there.
Raezyr tapped the ship comm again, but instead of transmitting out into the black void, his voice traveled to a maintenance tube within the ship. "Hey, you get that sensor adjusted yet?"
His brother's voice came back across the speaker. "No, and I won't get it done any time soon if I have to keep answering that question every five minutes. Just keep your tunic on. You're as jittery as a Kowakian monkey-lizard."
Raezyr ignored the jab and continued. "Something may have happened to them. We have to find that old mining base. If they didn't make it, we need to know that so we can get looking for them."
"You've said that already. You're starting to sound like a shorted out holo-recording," Trychon retorted with a chuckle. The click that followed told Raezyr his brother had shut off the comm, essentially ending the conversation.
For the next thirty minutes, Raezyr continued to send out his hail across a wide range of frequencies in case for some reason they were having trouble monitoring their usual frequency, but to no avail. Finally Trychon stepped through and sat down on the co-pilot's couch and began to fiddle with the sensor knobs.
"Is it working? Did you make the adjustments?" Raezyr asked excitedly. He'd been going crazy not knowing what had happened. They had been forced to take a longer route to get here, and despite the fact the Jet Razor could make point five past light speed, the other ships should have arrived here long before now.
"Patience, my young apprentice," Trychon said. Raezyr could hear the grin in the words even though his half-brother's face was turned away from him and chose to ignore the comment.
The older brother continued to fiddle with the controls until he finally leaned back, a look of satisfaction on his face. "Alright, it's working. If there's a power source big enough to light up a glow stick anywhere within half a million kilometers, we'll know about it."
Trychon had spent the last few hours turning the sensitivity up on the sensors. It had required him to spend most of the time crawling around in cramped access tunnels rewiring power converters and bypassing filters. He'd even had to suit up and crawl around the hull for an hour, slicing into the sensor array.
Normally, sensors were geared only to pick up large power sources such as ships, satellites and planetary settlements, but they had failed to record any signs of a facility after two slow orbits around the entire asteroid ring.
Fearing the worst, Trychon had amped up the sensitivity beyond anything they would normally be capable of. They'd have to turn it down before they left the system, though. If they flew into an inhabited system where ships and other sources of power were common, it'd blow the fuses. It'd be the electronic equivalent of a concussion grenade going off next to someone's ear.
Raezyr flew slowly, hoping the improvised sensor upgrade was really working. Even a powered down ship still had trace amounts of power flowing through it. If Rhox and Dianna had crashed, hopefully it'd pick it up, or at the very least, be able to pick up the minute traces of power that the dormant mining facility would use.
Suddenly Trychon notified Raezyr there was a faint signal on the edge of the sensor. Instantly Raezyer gunned it toward the source, quickly closing in on a huge asteroid nearly 400 kilometers in diameter on the edge of the dangerous belt of space rocks.
They consulted the sensor readouts the closer they came, and located the source of the reading in what looked like a cave in a large crater. Upon closer inspection, the opening was too uniform in size and shape to be naturally occurring, and as they drifted slowly inside on repulsor lifts, they saw the Ice Spectre sitting on a landing pad inside and looked to be in perfect shape.
As Raezyr was setting down, Trychon leaned forward and looked through the transparisteel view ports. "There's equipment set up for a mag-con field, but it doesn't appear to be on," he surmised. "We'd better suit up. If it really is off, then there's no atmo between us and the airlock to the base."
It took Raezyr a bit longer to pull on his Enviro-suit as Trychon had already done it once already today, but they were both ready rather quickly. Neither spoke. They didn't want to think about why Dianna's ship was sitting in the landing bay and appeared to be in good condition.
When they were ready, Trychon mashed the button which activated the ship's airlock. Once it cycled through, purging the oxygen and equalizing the pressure to that of the outside, the loading ramp lowered and they plodded slowly down and toward the main entrance to the mining facility.
They lumbered on in the suits like two huge, ungainly beasts, moving slower than Raezyr would have liked, although they finally made it. He punched in Dianna's standard access code given to all her crew members and the lights on the airlock control panel lit up, indicating it was cycling. Finally the doors slid open silently in the vacuum and they stepped in.
Once again, Raezyr activated the controls and cycle began again, this time in reverse, air filling the airlock and equalizing to the air pressure in the base. They took it as a good sign that there even was air pressure in the base.
Still, anything could be wrong, and they waited until the inner doors had opened, and the indicators built into the wrists of the their enviro-suits told them the air was safe to breath before they began to remove the bulky suits.
The helmets popped open with a hiss, one after the other. They pulled them off and tucked them under an arm as they heard footsteps clanking on the durasteel floor grates coming from down the corridor and around the bend.
Raezyr reached out with the Force, sensing the approaching lifeform. It wasn't who he had hoped. Still he pressed his senses out further, deeper and deeper into the asteroid facility and finally sensed the mind he sought. He sighed in relief.
Rhox Vegha came marching around the corner, a stern look on her face. "Don't even take those off, Sith," she began with a near snarl. "You can fuel up and grab some emergency supplies if you need them, then get out. The captain doesn't want you here."
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