Death by Design
Posted on Sat Apr 4th, 2026 @ 8:47pm by Mentis & Kalen "Rex" Vickers
Edited on on Sat Apr 4th, 2026 @ 9:08pm
3,623 words; about a 18 minute read
Chapter:
Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Old Vickers Shop, Mos Entha, Tatooine
Timeline: Setting Suns
He and Rex watched as dark, mottled scales flashed across the gaps, moving along the side of the building towards the front. The creature that wore the scales emitted a low, disjointed growl as it moved, like air escaping from a clogged air-duct. The pair held their breath as he movement stopped outside the front door and they heard a great claw scratching, testing the boards that separated the two men from the horrors outside in the ever-darkening streets.
After a few terrifying moments, the claw slid away and they heard its footsteps crunching away a few paces, although its strained growling could still be heard.
"I think...that was a rancor," Mentis gasped finally, "I can't fight a rancor; blaster bolts and lightning barely tickles a living one, let alone a dead one."
Rex had already moved by the time Mentis finished speaking. The name alone had been enough to set something cold and practical back into place.
"A rancor," he repeated under his breath, not because he doubted it, but because saying it aloud made the danger more real. His eyes flicked once toward the boarded front, where the strained growling still lingered somewhere beyond the walls, then away again. "Of course this karkin' town's got one of those too."
He did not waste time going back to the window. Instead, he turned toward the old counter and moved around it with the quick, economical certainty of a man following a map he had memorised years ago. Dust lay thick across the till and the counter surface, broken only by the recent disturbances of scavengers who had never known where to look. Then, he crouched and reached beneath the rear lip of the counter, fingers searching over old metal fittings and rough wood until they found the catch. A concealed latch clicked beneath his thumb. There was a soft internal release and a narrow floor panel, disguised by the grain and grime of the boards, shifted a fraction upward near the back of the workbench.
Rex moved to it at once and knelt, sliding his fingers into the seam before levering it open. Beneath lay a cramped compartment wrapped in insulation mesh and old cloth. At its centre sat a slim GalactaWerks datapad in that vile ochre-colouring casing of theirs, one corner scored and its corporate crest partially scratched away. Wire used for slicing to the device still ran from one port, where the device had been tampered with and broken into.
Rex let out a slow breath through his nose. "Brisck, you sly bastard."
He lifted the datapad free with more care than he had handled anything else since entering the shop and thumbed it awake. For a heartbeat the display remained dark and his heart sank. Then, lines of Aurebesh bloomed across it in pale blue, dense with indexed folders, transmission fragments and flagged reports.
Rex’s expression hardened as he skimmed.
"Bio-Weapons Division," he murmured, disgust thickening the words, although he did not completely track with all of the terms flashing in front of him. "Internal asset review. Pathogen series. Containment variant. Risk modelling. Executive sign-off..." His eyes narrowed further. "Nah, that's cute," he said, the chit dropping in relation to these final segments. "Very cute."
The files were structured to present the operation as though it belonged to some semi-detached arm of the Company, a shadow subsidiary with vague chains of accountability and a great many references to contracted oversight, compartmentalised authorisation and brand-use exemptions. It was written to look deniable, to suggest that, if this ever surfaced, GalactaWerks' Board could point at some buried agency and call it regrettable overreach.
Rex gave a humourless snort. "They've wrapped it in three layers of paperwork and called it someone else's crime."
Outside, something screamed in the street and was answered from farther off. The sound carried more sharply now that the suns had sunk behind the close-packed buildings. More footsteps followed, too many to count individually, their rhythms broken and aimless but growing steadily more energetic as the air cooled.
Rex’s thumb moved across the screen, scrolling faster. His brow furrowed, then abruptly sharpened.
"Hold on," he said, making sure to be quieter than before.
He angled the datapad, reading more closely. A local network status icon still pulsed in one corner, weak but active. One of the spaceports to the centre of Mos Entha, the larger installation seized and repurposed as their central lab and command point according to the data, remained tied into the settlement grid. Through that link, a final block of emergency systems data had been preserved. Buried among the reports sat a maintenance failsafe tied to a jury-rigged hyperdrive system and a cooling system someone had clearly sabotaged or repurposed in desperation - one of the ones Brisck mentioned as having some sense and scruples, perhaps. The note beside it was blunt enough to cut through all the corporate language.
Manual reset required. Cooling mechanism unstable. Critical thermal reaction projected.
Rex felt his stomach dip.
He read the final estimate twice to make sure he had not misread it, then looked up toward Mentis’ position by the boarded gap.
"They've rigged the whole settlement to go up," he said, voice flat with disbelief. "Or someone did after it all went bad. Hyperdrive core bleed routed into a cooling system. If the manual reset doesn't happen, the whole system overheats and detonates. The whole town, maybe more." He pushed himself to his feet, the datapad clenched tight in one hand now. "The main Company port's still on the local net, which means some of it still has power. That's where their lab and command centre was, 'ccording to this. Best chance we've got of stopping this thing is getting there and resetting the system before the whole place cooks itself apart." His jaw worked once, his focus having been restored at finding Brisck's bounty. "And if we can't stop it, then it's probably still our best shot at finding something that flies. But we ain't getting past that rancor."
The growl outside returned as if on cue, lower this time, reverberating faintly through the boards at the front of the shop. Whatever wore the rancor's shape had not gone far.
Rex glanced toward Mentis, noticing his friend had retrieved the blue crystal that Thane had given him. Catching his, his eyes then wandered back to the benches and shelves around them. Old components, part-opened droid casings, power couplings, vaporator guts, a stripped plasma cutter, repulsor elements from half-disassembled speeders. His mind began sorting them almost at once.
"Really?" He simply said to Mentis, the tone initially disbelieving. And, then, with more confidence: "No, really - can we?"
Mentis looked at the crystal, then over towards the Tatooine-born man.
"Maybe..." he uttered, squinting as he thought it through, "I have already assembled a basic crystal chamber and an old emitter Bomoor gave me. The remaining components of a lightsaber are not really that uncommon. Stuff you might find in all kinds of vehicles, tools and machinery."
The Rattataki's chain of thought began to translate into motion as he gently brushed over the workbench beside him to clear some space and began setting down the parts he had; lining them up. He set the blue crystal into a little cylinder of wires and then stepped back to look at it, arms folded and shoulder to shoulder with Rex.
"If we can do this, I'd feel a lot safer moving on," Mentis murmured, tilting his head so his overly-dilated left eye peered at the smuggler, "What do you think? One more Vickers repair job?"
Rex stared at the laid-out components for a moment, the chaos of the last hour still pressing at the edges of his thoughts. The datapad sat beside them, full of death sentences and corporate lies. Outside, the dark was thickening and the things in the streets were finding their legs again. Somewhere not far off, that undead rancor shifted its weight against the bones of the town and breathed like some sort of clogged podracer engine.
And yet, here, on this bench, it all narrowed. He let out a quiet breath through his nose and a crooked, lopsided grin tugged at one side of his mouth. Weak, but sincere.
"Yeah," he said, softer now. "Yeah... we can."
There was something almost familiar in the way he moved then. Not hurried, nor panicked, but focused. He stepped in beside Mentis and nudged the arranged components slightly, not dismissively - just adjusting and aligning as if the gestures helped him focus on what they had.
"You're not wrong," he went on, tone settling into something steadier, more assured. "Half this stuff's just parts pretending to be something special. It's the way they're talking to each other that matters, right? Space wizards not quite as magical as they like to think, eh."
His hand hovered over the spread, then moved with purpose. He reached for the repulsorlift emitter housing he had spotted earlier and cracked it open against the edge of the bench with a sharp twist. Internal rings and assemblies came free with a snap. He stripped one free, turning it in his fingers, eyes narrowing slightly as he visualised the flow before he handed it over to Mentis.
The Force-sensitive man took the ring and examined it in the faint light they dared to activate beside the workbench.
"Nothing really magical about a regulated stream of plasma," Mentis put one ring down and took the next one Rex handed him, "But there's something about how it responds to you. Or, more specifically, how the crystal responds to you and how you respond to it. That connection with your weapon just symbolises everything about the Force, whether you follow the Dark or Light side."
After he had assembled a small collection of the rings, he summoned them up into the air along with the crystal chamber and compared the diameters.
"Hmm," he sounded a little disappointed, "They should work to contain the plasma flow, but we might need to solder them in places to bridge some gaps. I don't want them shifting around inside while it's activated."
Popping them down again, he began working by hand to solder each one to a thin supporting rod, to create a stable channel.
As he did so, Rex then moved to a half-gutted vaporator resting in the corner, checking it for components, and soon pulling free a small thermal regulator circuit. He was not as gifted as his father in this field, but he has repaired enough of these machines as a youth. It came away with a shower of fine dust and a faint smell of burnt sand.
"Regulator should help. Last thing you want is your new toy deciding it's a thermal detonator, right?"
Mentis paused and wiped a little sweat from his brow, before he looked over at the circuit.
"Yes, any half-decent thermal regulator should be able to increase or lower the energy resistance based on thermal readings," he nodded, with a small smile towards his helpful companion, "I'm not sure what temperature range a moisture vaporator runs at but we're going to need to dial it way, way up!"
Rex dutifully removed the unnecessary parts of the circuit and adjusted the thermistor as instructed while Mentis continued assembling the pieces. He now had the basic framework of the saber, with the emitter largely completed and now wired directly into the crystal chamber, which would, in turn be connected to a heavy duty power cell that had been donated from a plasma torch. He would need to replace it with a more durable diatium power cell eventually, but this would function well enough in the short term.
Once he had the thermal circuit from Rex, Mentis bridged this between the power cell and the crystal chamber before again turning to the disassembled plasma torch and using the end cap as a pommel, which fit surprisingly well. He then sourced a small power gauge to test the power flow through to the crystal chamber, which led him to frown once again.
As Mentis continued tuning, Rex snapped a guarded switch from an old console plate, testing the resistance with his thumb before setting it down alongside the rest.
"Any good?"
Grasping the switch, Mentis tested it with his thumb and nodded in approval.
"Not bad," he inhaled sharply, allowing a small cautious smile, "A bit stiff but at least it has a safety cut off."
The pale humanoid then released his breath and furrowed his brow before explaining his issue:
"Problem is, the power flow is too erratic; the output from the torch’s power cell is spiking too much. That’ll throw the thermal circuit out of calibration. But worse, the crystal needs a perfectly stable feed to align properly. Natural crystals are even more temperamental than synthetics."
He set the switch down and rose from his stool, rubbing the scar along his cheek while his other hand tapped absently at his empty belt.
"We need something to smooth the current: a conductor plate that can even out spikes in power flow without warping under heat or field stress. Something dense and stable, which I doubt we will find in any of these scrap circuits."
Rex's hand drifted as he considered that, almost unconsciously, back to his jacket. He hesitated there for a second, thumb pressing against the inside pocket like before. Then, with a small exhale, he reached in and pulled the peggat free.
It caught the low light of the workshop as he turned it between his fingers.
Older than it looked and worn smooth in places by decades of handling. Not valuable in any real sense - not to anyone but him.
"My dad's," Rex said, voice lower now. "First peggat he ever earned. Kept it his whole life. Gave it to me, to make some sorta point." He rolled it once across his knuckles, then caught it again. "Maybe it's got a little more going for it than sentiment."
He stepped closer to the bench and held it up between them, indicating its edge.
"Dense alloy core, an older pressing. Conductive as hell, I reckon. Doesn't warp easy under heat or field stress... Old man used to joke it was tougher than half the junk he worked with."
Wide eyed, Mentis took in the small round treasure.
"That...might be precisely what we need," he gasped out in quiet disbelief before turning his eyes towards Rex's, voice softening, "But you’ve carried this for years. It’s not some scrap of alloy, it’s a piece of your father. I can’t just bury that inside a power conduit. It should stay with you."
Rex did not answer straight away. Instead, the peggat sat between his fingers still. His eyes had drifted, not to Mentis, but beyond him. Across the benches and the half-built frames. To the scattered tools and the long-settled dust.
The smell was still there, as he noticed when he first came in. It settled into him in a way the rest of the day had not. Not sharp like grief, not violent like what had happened to Brisck. Just… present. Familiar and unavoidable - despite years very actively keeping this part of his soul buried. Briefly, he thought at Mentis' parents, but figured this was truly not the time, nor something that would help either of them.
Instead of speaking, his gaze moved across the room in small increments. The corner where the old tool rack had once stood and the wall where parts used to hang in careful rows. The spot near the doorway where his father would lean, wiping his hands on a rag that was never quite clean, watching over his shoulder as he worked. The manual vice he insisted on installing.
For a moment, Rex said nothing at all, and then he let out a slow breath.
"I don't have much from here," he said quietly. "Not really." His thumb pressed lightly into the surface of the peggat, feeling the worn edge, the small imperfections left by years of handling. He turned it once more, then kept it still. "Just… this," he went on, almost absently. "And whatever stuck from... him." His eyes flicked back to Mentis then, clearer now,more settled. "He wasn't the sentimental type. Practical to a fault. If something worked, you used it. If it didn’t, you stripped it and made something that did."
He looked down at the components laid out across the bench. The crystal and the crude assembly taking shape. The parts that, somehow, were becoming something more than scrap.
"If he could see this," Rex said, quieter still, "us standing here, building something like this out of his old junk… trying to stay alive, maybe even do something worth a damn…" He huffed a small breath through his nose. "He'd be insufferably proud."
There was a brief pause, then Rex shifted his hand forward and placed the peggat down firmly among the components, closer to the coil assembly.
"So yeah," he said, voice steady again. "It goes in." He tapped it once with his finger, more decisive now. "Smooths the current, keeps the thing from tearing itself apart, and gives us half a chance out there." His eyes lifted back to Mentis, a flicker of something lighter returning. "He'd call that a good trade."
The faint grin returned, a little more genuine than before.
"Besides," he then added, tone easing just a fraction more, "means I get a time share in the thing, yeah? Assuming it don't explode the first time you switch it on."
Mentis sat back down on the stool and dropped his eyes down to the small fragment of currency. Rex watched him with a silent, growing curiosity. He was still the fearful, occasionally irritable man he had met back on Nar Shaddaa, running from his own past, but he had also re-awakened the side of himself that Axion had quashed. Sure, there were plenty of sentients out there with more passion and joviality, but he knew that such expressions from the Rattataki were not delivered on a whim, they were truly earned. Truly meant.
"Okay Rex," he was brought back as Mentis spoke, his fingers gently easing the peggat from the workbench, "I'll make your investment worthwhile."
He inclined his head upwards, looking into the distance for a moment before turning to Rex, "You know, I thought the greatest honour was Thane bestowing his crystal to me, but I think you win the contest of emotional weight."
A thin slither of a smile crept into his voice as he added:
"So, let's see if it even ignites before we talk about you taking it for a spin."
It was hard to tell how much time had passed, but Mentis worked quickly to get the final gifted piece in place before shoring up the rudimentary frame. All the while, the ever-faster shuffling of figures outside the building kept them on edge. The intermittent snarl and stomp from the rancor told them it too was not leaving this area any time soon.
Rex had taken up a watchful post at one of the windows, trying to determine just how many of them were out there and considering their route to the spaceport. He swivelled his head as he saw Mentis jump off his stool with some enthusiasm. He looked like he was about to exclaim but thought better of it and simply beckoned the Human over.
"I checked the power output again," he spoke in a hushed but determined tone, "Your peggat is perfectly stabilising the power flow and the resistance is holding steady now. The final test is to ignite it but..."
He looked over his shoulder at the door, "Well, you've heard lightsabers before: you can't exactly put a silencer on, especially not such a custom job as this."
Rex stood by the window a moment longer, watching the street below as the last of the light bled out of it. The shadows had fully claimed the alleys now. Movement was no longer hesitant; shapes drifted with purpose, slow but certain, gathering in loose clusters as if drawn by something they did not understand.
One of them stopped directly beneath the window. Its head tilted. Not up. Not quite. Just… enough.
Rex’s jaw tightened as Mentis finished speaking behind him. He turned as the words reached him, crossing the workshop in a few quiet steps. His eyes dropped immediately to the assembled weapon, then to where he knew the peggat was now seated within it. For a brief second, something unreadable flickered across his face.
At Mentis’ hesitation, Rex glanced toward the door as well. The old mechanism crraked. Something heavy brushed against them from the outside. A slow drag of weight - that same wet, obstructed breathing.
Rex let out a slow breath through his nose and straightened. "Yeah," he said quietly. "No quiet way of doing this." His hand drifted down to his blaster, resting there but not drawing it yet, as he had done before. "They already know something’s alive nearby, I reckon," he went on, voice calm now, settled into the kind of tone that came before something went wrong on purpose. "Question is whether we choose when it starts… or let them."
Rex glanced back once more to the weapon in Mentis’ hands, then to his face, something firm and certain settling behind his eyes.
"Yeah," he said simply, giving one final look around the old workshop, eyes threatening to betray him once more, then raised his blaster. "Yeah, let’s do it."
MENTIS
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