Pry Open Locker

Around the field of debris he paced, crawling and climbing, examining each piece and discarding it. Then he saw a slightly bigger chunk. A corner of one, anyway; the rest was buried in the sand. He approached it curiously and gave it a gentle kick. It didn’t budge. It was heavy, and after a few minutes of digging with his hands, he realized that he’d found a small storage locker.

He heaved it up out of the hole, wishing RZ-7 was there to help. The back was ripped where the bolts that had held it inside the ship had sheared off. The locker had been jerked right off its mount and thrown free.

He pushed his visor up onto his forehead.

“A ship crashed here, and somebody took the wreckage away, but they didn’t get everything,” he said, trying to sort through his thoughts. “A Jedi flew this craft. Or rode inside it.” When he said the words out loud, they sounded true. “Where did he sit? Where was he going? Why was he going there? Why did he crash here?”

Was he really shot down, or did the craft experience some kind of mechanical failure?

Karr had no way of knowing. He could barely fly anything, even the ship that had gotten him that far. Any effort at diagnostics would be useless. “At least the usual kind of diagnostics,” he mumbled.

He pulled his trusty little blade from a pocket and began to pry at the warped metal. After three or four tries, it popped open with a creak and a groan. Inside, he found a tangle of loose wires that connected to nothing at all, and an empty life-support pack. At first, he didn’t see anything else, but something told him to keep looking.

So he kept looking, pushing aside the wires and trash until he saw it: a roundish, palm-sized device made of a dully gleaming metal.

His eyes widened. He held it up to the light to get a better look, and when he was sure, he hollered out to RZ-7. “I’ve got something! I’ve really got something!”


- Force Collector, Chapter 12