The Bantha's Breath

Posted on Tue Jan 13th, 2026 @ 1:32pm by Kalen "Rex" Vickers & Mentis

2,441 words; about a 12 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: The Bantha's Breath Transport, En route to Tatooine
Timeline: Concurrent with New Alderaan

The transport had been christened with the kind of humour that only spacers and the desperate found funny.

The Bantha’s Breath.

The name was painted in flaking ochre letters along the portside of the forward hull, half-obscured by soot blooms from the last dozen hard burns. Someone - perhaps the captain, perhaps a bored deckhand with a stencil and too much time - had added a crude line drawing beside it, of a squat bantha head with a distended snout, cartoon vapour issuing from its nostrils and mouth in looping spirals.

Inside, the joke curdled.

The air was warm in the wrong way: not heat, exactly, but the stale, damp press of too many bodies and too little filtration. Every intake cycle carried a faint tang of coolant and old disinfectant, layered over sweat, cheap food, and the oily ghost of engine exhaust that no amount of cleaning ever truly lifted out of bulkheads. The deck plates had that slight, persistent vibration of a ship that never fully relaxed; even at steady cruise, the Bantha’s Breath trembled like a working animal kept on too short a tether.

They had seats - technically. Long, battered benches bolted to the wall in rows, the upholstery patched with mismatched fabric and transparent tape. The aisle between them was narrow enough that passing traffic became a series of apologies, jostles, and the occasional muttered insult when someone’s bag caught on a knee.

Mentis sat with his back to the hull, robe drawn in and hood down - not because he wanted to look harmless, but because in a crowd like this, the safest way to be noticed was to give people nothing interesting to notice. He could feel the ship around him as a constant mechanical breath: valves opening, vents cycling, the low, distant thrum of power. It was not the sleek order of a military vessel, nor the chaotic hum of Nar Shaddaa’s endless machines. It was a tired persistence.

Across the aisle, Rex Vickers had chosen a seat that placed him in the traffic lane, one boot angled out like he might trip anyone who came too close. He had shrugged his longcoat tighter around himself despite the heat, and the set of his shoulders suggested he didn’t trust the bench to hold his weight, or the ship to hold its course.

Rex was not performing, either. Not much, at least.

From Nar Shaddaa to Naboo to Bespin, even when he was frightened, he wore his fear like a mask he had decorated himself: a grin, a joke, a shrug delivered with flair. Here, the grin came late, and only when it had to. When it did appear, it looked borrowed. Something pulled from habit rather than instinct.

Mentis watched him without staring. The Human’s hands were busy. Always busy.

He checked the clasp on his glove; re-tightened a strap that did not need it. Once, his fingers brushed the inside of his coat near his ribs, as if confirming something was still there. Mentis caught the movement and was reminded of the way Rex had guarded his cigarras on the Janna - superstitious little rituals, the sort people performed when they could not control the larger variables.

There were announcements, too, which were thin, tinny bursts through an overhead speaker that crackled as though it resented being asked to function.

“-all passengers are reminded that the Bantha’s Breath is a licensed civilian conveyance operating under-” the voice cut, returned, cut again, “-…in the event of decompression, oxygen masks will-”

A tired groan rose from the benches. Someone threw an empty ration wrapper in protest, and it drifted down slowly, turning end over end, and landed in a puddle that had no business existing on a ship in flight.

A steward droid - an ancient-looking, narrow-bodied thing with a dented chassis and its plating painted the same beige as the walls - rolled down the aisle on whining repulsors, one arm ending in a clamp that held a clipboard. Its photoreceptors flashed as it scanned tickets and faces with mindless efficiency. A strip of metal where its serial tag should have been had been ground smooth. Someone had tried to paint over the scar, and it only made it all the more obvious.

The droid paused by Mentis and Rex.

Rex held his stub of a boarding chit up between two fingers, as if offering a bribe or a joke.

“Name,” the droid said, voice flat and too loud.

Rex gave it with the same ease he gave everything - something plausibly real, plausibly false. He did not look at Mentis when he did it.

The droid’s sensor lingered a fraction too long on Mentis. Its optics flicked once, twice, as if the algorithms inside it were searching for a category that fit him.

“Species designation?” it asked.

Mentis looked at Rex as though expecting him to answer for him, but the Human gave him nothing to work with so he turned back to the droid.

“Am I that obscure to identify?” he frowned, mismatched eyes burrowing into the expressionless face-plate of the machine, “If it must be recorded for posterity, I am ‘Rattataki’.”

The droid did not answer but instead looked back at its pad so Mentis leaned forward and gestured at the device, “That’s double ‘t’ on the ‘Ratta” and one on the ‘taki’”

He leaned back and suddenly became quite quiet, shifting his gaze wondering if he had made too much of a scene, but the other passengers seemed either unfazed or uninterested in the exchange and Rex simply shook his head lightly as he twiddled the chit in his fingers. The droid simply carried on, not even acknowledging the interaction.

As it moved away, Rex exhaled through his nose, took his sleeve and wiped a patch of grime from the window beside him. The gesture looked almost compulsive, as though he wanted to see the stars clearly enough to convince himself they were still there.

Beyond the glass, hyperspace streaked in pale lines It should have been beautiful. They had watched hyperspace before - Mentis had even felt the strange pressure of it in the Force, as if reality itself thinned when you pushed hard enough in the right direction.

On the Bantha’s Breath, it felt less like wonder and more like escape.

A child cried two rows up, exhausted rather than frightened. A woman, who looked thin and sun-browned, with the permanent squint of someone raised beneath harsh light, hissed at him to stop. Her accent had that sandy drawl associated with Outer Rim worlds where speech was shaped by grit and heat.

The man beside her wore a cheap corporate jacket - too clean for this ship, and too new for the way he slouched. A GalactaWerks patch had once been stitched to the upper sleeve. Someone had cut it off, leaving a pale outline like a scar. He spoke in low tones to anyone who would listen about shutdowns and dead-end scams and Anchorhead Company suits calling the shots from behind a desk. Each sentence ended with the same bitter little laugh, the kind that wanted company in its anger.

“Don’t go there,” he told a young couple with a bundled infant. “Anchorhead’s a mouth that eats credits. If you ain’t got a contract, you ain’t got nothin’. Bestine’ll let you breathe, at least.”

Rex pretended not to listen, but Mentis noticed the way his gaze flicked - sharp and involuntary - at the mention of Anchorhead. A minute later he adjusted his coat again, and Mentis saw the tendons in his jaw jump once, as if he had bitten down on a word that wanted to jump out.

Mentis eyed the man for a moment before allowing his gaze to drift to the floor: his pupils started to look for patterns in the scuffs and scratches on the floor as though reading a set of very dirty tea leaves. His mind wandered onto thoughts of the world they were heading too: Tatooine was the land of burnt promises and dried up hopes but, for so many, it was the only home they knew and the only home they could ever hope to know.

It had been Rex’s home and, from what the man himself had explained, he would have likely spent his days scraping by in his father’s mech shop, were it not for him taking off with the GalactaWerks Marines. From the sounds of it, they had not left on the best terms, but Rex had only wanted to make a better life for the both of them after his mother passed. Now he was going back and it was clearly a source of great conflict within him.

Nearby, Rex sat with one ankle crossed over the other knee, a posture trying for casual. But his foot bounced, once, twice, then stopped, controlled with effort. His fingers tapped against his thigh - an irregular rhythm, like someone drumming to drown out a thought. He glanced at the overhead speakers when they crackled again, not because he cared about the announcement, but because the sound gave him an excuse to look anywhere except forward.

Mentis had seen Rex afraid before. He had seen him in the Valley of the Dark Lords with blood on his teeth, eyes rolling as he tried not to die. He had seen him swagger through Nar Shaddaa like a man who had never lost anything, only to reveal, in small unguarded moments, the shape of what he carried.

This was not that, it seemed - this was older. Quieter, perhaps. Less immediate.

The Breath shuddered as it transitioned, hyperspace dropping away, stars snapping back into pinpoints, the ship’s inertial compensators lagging half a heartbeat behind the deceleration. Bodies rocked. Someone cursed. A stack of plastic cups toppled from a netted shelf and scattered down the aisle.

A pale wash of light flooded the cabin through the windows. It was not the pinpricks of starlight - but bright and unforgiving sunlight, born of two bright suns.

It was too bright and incredibly harsh. Even filtered through transparisteel, it made the interior look sicker; the stains more pronounced, the sweat on foreheads more obvious. Mentis heard a few passengers inhale in unison, a communal reaction that was not awe but recognition.

One of the suns of Tatooine hung in the distance, a white-gold disc that looked too close to be trusted.

The ship’s speakers crackled again.

“-approach sequence commencing… Bestine… repeat, Bestine… all passengers remain seated until-”

A ripple of movement ran through the benches as people began gathering bags anyway. The droid steward returned, now joined by a second unit with one wheel out of alignment, both of them herding with their bodies rather than their voices.

Rex did not stand immediately. He watched the light, instead, his gaze fixed on it as if he could bargain with it by sheer stubbornness. His mouth tightened into a line, then softened. His hand went, once more, to that spot inside his coat near his ribs.

A small, intimate gesture. Not a check for a weapon, it seemed, but to check for something else.

Mentis could not yet tell what.

Rex finally rose, rolling his shoulders as though loosening old tension out of muscle. He lifted his bag - too light for a man who claimed to be a professional smuggler, and too heavy for someone pretending to be a harmless passenger - and slung it over one shoulder.

When he turned, his eyes met Mentis’ for the first time since the droid’s scan.

There it was: the returning smile.

Flashy. Familiar. The one that promised everything was under control - but it seemed to have arrived too late, and seemed almost out of place.

“C’mon, Mantis,” Rex said, still using wrong name, more than obviously deliberate now, like a talisman he would not put down. “Let’s go get ourselves cooked alive.”

He moved into the aisle with the rest of them, swept along by the press of bodies and the ship’s tired insistence that it was time to disembark.

Mentis rose slowly, allowing the main heft of the passengers to pass before reaching under his seat for his own side bag. It did not contain much: Thane’s old crystal was safely nestled in his inner jacket pocket, but he had gathered together some components that could go towards constructing a new blade, which he carried with him to study and practice assembling if time allowed. He also brought some nutrient bars and a large flask of filtered water, which he intended to eke out as long as he could before refilling on the planet. While vaporated water was supposedly safe, it just always tasted empty and wrong.

Hoisting his bag across his shoulder, he followed along, squinting as the suns were allowed their first unfiltered shot at his face as the transport ramp descended at the far end of the ship and the light descended across the metallic interior like a wall of fire. No longer seeing Rex in the heave of people, Mentis pressed on steadily, knowing he would catch up eventually.

When he reached the ramp, he paused at the top as a dry heat caught his body, as though he had just sunk into a scratchy heated blanket. There was little breeze as they had landed in a sunken hanger that seemed to have been carved out of the ground itself. Looking up, he caught a glimpse of an azure blue sky with not a cloud in sight and with barely any traffic. His eyes drifted down until they fell on Rex, standing looking back at him across the hanger, frame slightly askew as he held his bag.

Waving an acknowledgement, the Rattataki hurried on down the ramp and towards Rex.

“Quite some heat you have here,” Mentis commented as he caught up and started to move along with Rex towards the exit, “I didn’t think it would be that different to Mustofar, but I’m willing to admit I was surprised.”

Rex let out a short, barked laugh at that, the sound pitched just a touch too high to be entirely natural. “Yeah, well,” he said, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder and starting toward the mouth of the hangar, “Mustafar wants you dead... Tatooine just wants you gone.”

TBC

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