20230729 Crimson Rescue, part B

Jedi Vanya explained the Eborreans culture in general terms to Leftenant Pag Dan and the rest of our new local friends while the Night Sparrow took us to the fairly large city where our Crimson Knights were planning to hide the aforementioned Sword of Khashyun, the secret key to the super weapon called the Sun Spear.
 
The Leftenant knew of the Eborrean puppet-master parasites he called Thralls, (which name themselves Vindrizi,) to which his race is largely immune. So, that's good to know.
 
The Yonbiss natives knew of the Eternal Sith and the Eboreans and their unfriendly competition.
 
Perhaps we could find a way to coat the Khashyun with something which will give the Sun Spear indigestion or a complete heart attack.
 
Perhaps, we could disseminate disinformation:
Sword is disintegrated? Or better yet...
Sword has been taken to a difficult distant place. (D'Joy is looking up a place dangerous to get to and totally uninhabited.)
 
B-21 and I found a maintenance station close to Engineering. We scanned the sliver of the Sword, a brushed nickel-like metal, which seemed to have snapped off rather than ductile shearing. Beskar! It was made of Beskar charged with energy like a battery. We did not have enough to reconstruct the shape. Whatever broke it off must have been equally formidable. The sword probably was still in one piece after this shard was knocked off.
 
Local planetary holonet was focused on planetary defense.
 
A closer scan of the energy imbuing the Beskar shard showed a great deal of power similar to magnetised plasma like in a light foil or light saber. It appeared the sword would not contain enough energy to be the engine of a ship such as the Sun Spear, but it certainly could be the command circuit controlling the ship.
 
The power signature (particularly the frequency) was quite a bit different from a light foil or a light saber when it comes to sensing it at a range, but when it comes to combat capability, the sword would be right on par with either of those.
 
B-21 and I built a sensor that could sense the sword from a short range, (or a long range if connected to a ship's sensors).
 
Arrival at the durable but badly beaten city was smooth with no one shooting at us, which I noted was remarkable.
It appeared to be a secondary spaceport city, but formerly a major metropolis. Many skyscrapers had been reduced to skeletons, sometimes twisted ones. But most of the buildings were apparently still inhabited while rebuilding was ongoing. There was even a marketplace with children playing with a ball not far from our vacant lot landing spot.
 
The Leftenant visited his barracks near the marketplace.
Davish, our Crimson Knight, got together with his local brethren to share news.
The Yondidi portmaster Bab Sritoo boarded our ship with a most impressive scanning device and who shared a common hand gesture with So'Zen, interestingly enough. I think we made a good impression on him.
 
Almon joined us in the disguise of Heath Toffee, a scholarly student of life. His disinformation campaign was complete with evidence that one of three suspicious ships which left in the last 6 months might likely be the one that took the Sword of Khashyun to a distant rim tomb world where it is now certainly located and guarded.
 
Then we took many food rations and played the barter game at the marketplace to gather materials to build more Sword sensors and upload the disinformation to several merchants' information databases so the warring factions could stumble upon it the next time they searched for the Sword.
 
Davish found his fellows, Norak and Rok have been fighting with the Sith over the ground where the Sun Spear landed.
 
Stealing it from them is likely going to happen, I calculate.
 
Mr. Toffee and I played a unique version of the barter game, where we did not try to minimize the number of swaps, but we tried to maximize the number of merchants we encountered, and we hacked into some of their data bases and simply spoke to others to sow bits and pieces of our disinformation campaign so that a detective or anyone searching for the Sword would find it with a bit of work.
 
A shorter Yondidi hippo man in coveralls, a bit pale, perhaps a miner, appeared to be watching us intently and following us. He had been jotting down notes of us in his datapad, labeling us as outlaw techs, identifying the two of us for pickup. I copied that text and sent it to Vanya's famously insecure datapad.
 
I surreptitiously activated my shield belt, and told Heath, "This Looks Especially Beautifully Detailed, Looking Every Instant Having Superiority," knowing he would easily notice that the first letter of each word spells out, "shield belt" backwards. I stepped away from the merchant so he would be in less danger of getting accidentally hit by our would-be abductors.
 
Just then, two Eternal Sith tie fighters opened fire, strafing the marketplace. And several Sith teammates entered the marketplace shouting that they were going to take the two of us, in various terms.
 
I used my wrist slingshot to drop a tent pole, obscuring his sight. Heath slapped the tail of a beast of burden, sending it galloping over the 6, no 5, assailant Sith Troopers. The Port Authority, the Leftenant, and his men approached, firing their ion weapons at the easily identified assailants.
 
I saw Davish apparently getting electrocuted by the little spy, so, much as it pains my heart, I programmed the little spy's datapad to overheat and explode. Heath tossed large nuts in the shell at the approaching troopers, causing a good bit of slippery chaos. But the Sith Trooper who had led the charger to acquire Heath and myself, stood up right in front of me.
 
He reached for my throat, causing my shield belt to activate, and I apologized, "Hey, I'm an Outlaw Tech. What can I say?"
 
He drew a vibro knife and approached me slowly, too slowly to trigger my shield that a threat was approaching. I held up one palm to him, looked at my data pad, and started typing frantically, saying, "Sorry, this is a really important text. I have to take this." He seemed incensed as I used my scanner glove to read the encrypted radio signals his helmet was emitting, and used my datapad to duplicate the same signals with a 1 second delay, repeating over and over. I didn't know nor care what the siganls were, as long as he received and sent them over and over in his helmet.
 
He seemed to be unable to see me, or saw two of me. Perhaps his heads-up-display was malfunctioning, instead of his hearing as I had intended.
 
Our fight was interrupted by someone's pop-up e-web or similar device. The Trooper dodged the repeated blasts, and I followed behind him, using him as my human shield.