The Long Dune

Posted on Sat Feb 7th, 2026 @ 1:17pm by Kalen "Rex" Vickers & Mentis

2,498 words; about a 12 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Dune Sea, Tatooine
Timeline: High Sun, After "Tatooine, Tainted" (concurrent with New Alderaan)

OLD

"Of course," Rex said, spreading his hands as if the answer were obvious. "It’s me. I’m always safe, Mantis."

The Human turned toward the speeder, already moving, already committed. He swung himself into the driver’s seat with practised ease, but the moment he settled in, the smile slipped just a fraction. His hands rested on the controls a beat too long before doing anything with them, fingers tapping once, twice, then stilling. His eyes tracked the horizon again, not toward Bestine this time, but toward where Mos Entha lay buried somewhere beyond the dunes.

Whatever he saw there, he kept it to himself.

The speeder coughed as he brought it to life, then steadied into a rough, uneven idle.

"Hop in," Rex said, glancing back over his shoulder, the grin already back in place. "Long drive."

Beyond the settlement, the desert waited.

And Rex, despite everything written into his posture and his pauses, eased the speeder forward all the same.

NEW

The speeder howled across the dunes like a wounded animal. Its repulsors whined in protest every time Rex pushed it harder, the whole frame rattling and shuddering as it skimmed low over the sand, throwing up long tails of dust that hung briefly in the air before being torn apart by the heat. The desert stretched out in all directions, a rolling sea of pale gold broken only by the occasional line of jagged rock or the bleached rib of something long dead and half-buried.

They were going faster than they should.

Too fast for the terrain, and too fast for a machine held together by stubbornness and old welds. Too fast for a place where help did not come when it was needed.

Even so, Rex did not slow.

He sat forward in the seat, one hand tight on the controls, the other resting near the manual throttle override as if daring the speeder to complain again. The wind tore at his coat snapping the fabric against his shoulders, and his eyes never stopped moving. Left and right, and to the horizon. He regularly checked the rear sensor before looking back to the dunes ahead.

He did not fill the silence - that alone was wrong.

The man who normally talked his way through danger, boredom, fear, and victory alike now said nothing beyond the occasional clipped instruction when the speeder bucked hard enough to threaten throwing them sideways. His jaw was set, lips pressed thin, the easy humour stripped away by the landscape unfolding around them.

The dunes between Bestine and Mos Entha felt emptier than they should have, even to an off-worlder like Mentis.

No bantha herds lumbering in the distance, and no Tusken silhouettes cresting ridgelines. There were not even Jawa sandcrawlers crawling the horizon like legendary moving fortresses, unchanged for so many millennia.

Just sand, heat and distance.

Even the sky felt hollow - a flat, merciless blue with the twin suns hanging high and bright, bleaching colour and depth from everything beneath them. The air shimmered constantly, turning far-off shapes into mirages that resolved into nothing when they drew closer.

At one point, Rex reached down and flicked the speeder’s comm dial, twisting it through a range of local frequencies. The speakers crackled to life with a burst of static, a half-formed voice cutting in and out beneath the hiss.

"...Bestine traffic... repeat, this is-"

The signal wavered, stretched thin, then collapsed into noise.

Rex adjusted the dial again. Slowly and more carefully.

There was static. A low, warbling tone, and then nothing.

He leaned closer to the console, jaw tightening, and tried one more band. This time there was only a faint, distant pulse, like a heartbeat heard through too much sand.

"That’s not right," he muttered at last, more to the speeder than to his passenger. He killed the radio with a sharp twist of the dial and pushed the throttle again.

The speeder surged forward, protesting loudly as it skimmed over a particularly steep dune, its nose dipping hard enough to make the repulsors scream before Rex corrected it with a practiced flick of the controls. Sand sprayed up around them, peppering the underside of the chassis.

He did not smile this time.

As the distance ticked away, the land began to change almost imperceptibly. The dunes flattened. The sand grew darker, mixed with grit and stone. Old track lines appeared now and then, half-erased by wind but unmistakably artificial. The remains of vaporator towers dotted the landscape at irregular intervals, some still standing, others collapsed in on themselves like broken insects.

Rex slowed only slightly, just enough to let the speeder ride lower and steadier, and his eyes narrowed.

"There," he said quietly, nodding ahead.

On the horizon, Mos Entha finally began to resolve out of the shimmer, but there was no rising dust from traffic; no distant engine noise. There was no movement at all that the eye could easily catch.

The speeder ate up the last stretch of ground toward the settlement, its engine note uneven now, strained by the long run and the heat. Rex’s gaze flicked once to the fuel readout, then back to the town ahead. He brought the speeder to a relative stop, still a good distance from the city.

If he had hoped, even briefly, that Brisck’s message had been an exaggeration, the silence ahead did nothing to support that hope in either man's mind right now.

"What can you sense?" Rex then asked after a few more moments of silence, in a very out-of-character query that directly addressed Mentis' talents. The man was clearly uneasy.

Mentis had been sitting uncomfortably with his arms at his sides, feeling out of place riding alongside a man that should have been familiar but now seemed so changed. His eyes flitted over to Rex: the most obvious thing he could sense was the fear that surrounded from the Human like a dry itch that was all too familiar to the Rattataki. There were also surface thoughts swirling around the man's head that kept drawing his mind's eye back towards the item in his pocket, although he could not see deep enough to visualise the object.

Unclenching his hands from the unravelling seat fabric, Mentis brought himself up so he was now standing up in the speeder and peered out through squinting eyes at the faint shape of the city on the horizon. Mos Entha's skyline was fairly flat, like most settlements on the planet: an assortment of rounded and rectangular sandstone buildings along with a smattering of plasteel structures. One main road fed into the town through an old dark metal archway, which had some kind of large vehicle stopped in front of it, and another road seemed to emerge from the far-side near to what looked like another round spaceport building, again with no sky traffic hovering around it.

"Not much..." Mentis' voice came out hoarse, not realising how dry his throat was after the near-silent ride.

He coughed and reached down to his belt and grabbed a pair of slimline electrobinoculars from his belt and peered through them. Still, he saw no movement: no speeders, no signs of life. He zoomed in on the vehicle at the archway: it was some kind of tank, made of dark metal with faded yellow painted lines on the edges. It seemed to have been positioned intentionally to block the road but seemed as equally devoid of life as the rest of the settlement.

He visualised the city in the Force and felt a mirky cloud across the whole place: like he was sensing something much further away. It was almost as if the city had been buried by the sand before its time.

Bringing the binoculars back down, he turned to Rex with a pained expression, "I know it might seem like an old excuse, but the Force really is clouded here. I can't pin-point anything or anyone in there."

Rex was still staring at the city, jaw working slowly, as if chewing on something that did not want to go down. The silence pressed in again, thick and uncomfortable, broken only by the speeder’s uneven idle and the faint hiss of cooling metal.

"Clouded," he repeated at last, quietly. Not sceptical or dismissive. Just weighing the word as if it were a physical thing.

He reached down and cut the engine. The speeder’s whine dropped away into an abrupt, ringing quiet that felt too loud for a moment before the desert reclaimed itself. Heat ticked and creaked through the chassis as it settled.

Rex exhaled slowly through his nose.

"Alright," he then said.

He slipped his hand into his coat and drew the blaster Cindra free. The DL-18 looked small compared to the tank blocking the archway ahead, but the familiar weight of it seemed to anchor him. He thumbed the power check, the soft hum of the charge cell answering back, and held it low at his side rather than aiming it.

"We leave the speeder here," Rex decided, glancing back at the dunes behind them. "Out of sight. If we need to run, we don’t want to be doing it under fire or with a dead engine." His eyes flicked to Mentis then, sharp and searching. "And if your instincts are telling you this is a bad idea," he added, voice tight but level, "you won’t be the first one today."

The Human wung himself out of the speeder and dropped into the sand, boots sinking slightly as he straightened. He took a few steps forward, then stopped, looking up at Mos Entha once more.

Every part of him wanted to turn around, Mentis could tell.

There was something deeply wrong about a town this size being this quiet. Not just abandoned quiet - dead quiet. The kind of stillness that felt intentional, as if the place itself were holding its breath.

"That tank obviously didn’t end up there by accident," Rex muttered, more to himself than to Mentis. "Someone parked it. Someone meant to block that road."

He nodded toward the archway. Up close, the vehicle looked worse than it had through the binoculars. Scorch marks ran along one flank. The treads were half-buried in drifted sand, and one side hatch hung open at an awkward angle.

No bodies and no blood. That absence gnawed at them.

"We go in on foot," Rex said, decision settling in his chest like a stone. "Slow. Quiet. We don’t use the main road if we can help it. Climb if we have to?"

Mentis eyes drifted towards the rooftops at the suggestion. They were mostly flat roofs, particularly the residential buildings, with plenty of stairwells and balconies carved into the sandy stone that could be used to scale the outside.

"Probably the way I'd go," Mentis agreed, "Good to get a clearer vantage on the place. Of course, in full sun, we won't be quite as invisible as I'd like but better than the alternatives."

At the thought of the sun baking down on them up there, Mentis grasped his flask from his belt and took a firm swig of water from inside before swishing it around, disappointed that it was not as full as he had hoped.

Frowning, he capped it off again and gestured it towards the settlement.

"What direction are we heading? Did this friend of yours say where he was or do you intend to head back... uh..." Mentis choked a little on the final word, "...home?"

Rex was still looking at Mos Entha, eyes tracing the outer line of the settlement rather than its centre, following the curve of the wall and the way the sand had piled up against it over time. His jaw worked once, slow, deliberate, before he finally turned his head just enough to acknowledge Mentis without quite meeting his eyes.

"Brisck didn’t give me a location," he said. His voice was level, but stripped bare of humour. "Message was a mess. Half-sentences. Cuts. Background noise I couldn’t place. No coordinates. No 'meet me here'."

Stepping away from the speeder, Rex began moving along the settlement’s outer edge, keeping to the broken ground where sand met stone. He crouched briefly near one of the moisture vaporators, studying it with a frown. The unit hummed steadily, refrigerator pipes even externally slick with collected water that dripped into unattended storage tanks beneath the ground, already overflowing and spilling uselessly back into the sand.

"These should be shut down if no one’s home," he muttered. "Credits don’t pay themselves." He straightened, scanning again. "Tusken work would look different," Rex went on, more to convince himself than anyone else. "You’d see tracks. Single file. Bantha prints. Scorch marks from potshots, maybe a body or two dragged off if someone got unlucky."

There was none of that.

No disturbed sand beyond the usual drift. No signs of a skirmish. No looted vaporators. No broken doors along the outer structures.

"And Jawas would’ve stripped this place bare by now," Rex added. "Whole town sitting like this for days? They’d be elbow-deep in wiring."

He stopped near a section of the wall where time and erosion had done most of the work for them. Crates lay stacked haphazardly against the stone, old cargo containers bleached almost white by the suns. A collapsed awning frame leaned at an angle that created a crude ladder of bent durasteel and torn fabric. Rex tested one crate with his boot. It shifted, but held.

"Best place to start is still the cantinas," he said, finally addressing Mentis’ earlier question. "If anyone holed up, ran, or barricaded themselves before things went bad, whatever the kriff it is that has happened, that’s where stories start." His mouth twisted. "Assuming there’s anyone left to tell them." He looked up at the wall properly, gauging distance and exposure. "Well, let's get climbin'. Get eyes on the streets before we commit. If something’s off, we wanna see it before it sees us."

He holstered the blaster to get a grip, hauling himself up onto the first crate with a grunt, with Mentis doing so more deftly and quicker. The stone radiated heat against them as they reached higher, boots scraping softly against the wall.

From this close, Mos Entha felt wrong in a way they could not quite articulate. Not ruined, par se. Just… paused. Like a place abandoned mid-thought.

As he finallyreached the top edge of the wall, shortly after Mentis, Rex stopped.

For a long second, he did not move. Then, very slowly, he pulled himself up and crouched, one hand braced against the stone as he looked down into the settlement proper.

The wind stirred faintly, carrying with it the smell of hot sand, old metal, and something else underneath - something stale and offensive.

The stench of decay.

TBC

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