Dead End

Posted on Sun Jul 5th, 2026 @ 3:40pm by Mentis & Kalen "Rex" Vickers
Edited on on Sun Jul 5th, 2026 @ 8:37pm

3,484 words; about a 17 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: Dune Sea, Tatooine
Timeline: After "Severance Package"

The executive shuttle had not landed so much as given up. The craft sat at an angle amidst a field of fractured stone and dry scrub, one landing strut collapsed beneath its own weight whilst the port-side engine still emitted the occasional unhappy sputter of smoke. A long scar stretched behind it across the desert floor where the damaged vessel had bounced, skidded and finally buried itself into the ground hard enough to convince even the most stubborn machinery that flying was no longer a realistic ambition.

For several long moments, neither occupant moved. The cockpit was dark save for a handful of dying indicators and the pale glow of the night beyond the cracked canopy.

Finally, Rex stirred. A groan escaped him first. Slowly, he lifted his head from where it had come to rest against the controls and stared blankly through the canopy. The desert stared back and his eyes drifted left and settled upon the distant flicker of lights perhaps a few miles away across the darkness.

A settlement - civilisation. Actual civilisation.

For one glorious moment, relief crossed his face - and then he remembered who was sitting behind him.

Rex closed his eyes and he drew in a slow breath.

"Mentis."

There was a moment of silence as Rex stared at the shadowy shape hunched over one of the rear seats he had assumed was the Rattataki. There was a little shuffle and the shape began to move, groaning with a faint rattle in the throat that made Rex momentarily stiffen before Mentis familiar mis-matched eyes looked at him with their usual nervous twinkle.

"Urgh...Rex?" came the hazy response.

Rex relaxed slightly and queried:

"Would you mind explainin' to me why ever time you're my copilot, I wake up next to another crashed ship in the middle of a desert?"

Wrenching himself up, the bruised and battered man released himself from the seat and hobbled forward, wincing as he put weight on his leg. He came towards the front and stared out at the quiet desert night and the twinkling lights in the distance.

He then eased himself down next to Rex, with a grunt of pain.

"Why?" he echoed stiffly, "I guess I'm just bad luck... at least with ships."

He coughed and added, "I couldn't comment on the desert part though - maybe that one's you. But, at least we always seem to survive."

Mentis rubbed his arm and tilted it away sheepishly as he spoke the last words.

Rex stared out across the desert for a few moments longer before snorting quietly through his nose.

"Yeah, well," he muttered, rubbing at the bruise forming along the side of his head, "at least this time you don't owe me any extra credits."

He gestured vaguely backwards with one thumb towards the crippled executive shuttle.

"Can't exactly blame you for that one. Company reactor explodes, experimental nightmare monster tries to eat us, stolen luxury shuttle gets punched halfway across the desert..." He shrugged stiffly. "I reckon even Hutt insurance brokers would call that an act of fate." A faint grin tugged briefly at the corner of his mouth. "The speeder deposit, though? I'm telling 'em that's on you."

For the first time since Mos Entha, the tension eased slightly and Rex shifted awkwardly and began patting down the various pockets sewn into his battered duster. The process took longer than expected. Every movement seemed to reveal a new bruise or sore muscle, accompanied by increasingly offended grunts as he searched himself.

Eventually, he produced something from one of the deeper inner pockets - a small collection of worn peggats, not nearly as impressive as the one now embedded in Mentis' new weapon, and not many. Just a tiny handful.

The coins rattled softly in his palm as he held them up between them.

Rex looked at the money and then at the distant lights, and then back at the money again.

"Well now." He jostled them lightly. "If we can make the walk without either of us collapsing dramatically, I reckon we've got enough here for one drink each." His eyes narrowed. "Mind you, if this place charges Company prices, we might have to share."

Mentis looked at the peggats gently clinking in Rex's palm, almost moved to a slight smile before disturbing images interrupted him.

"Rex... I..." he began, before clenching his eyes firmly and forcing half of the smile back through. When he looked back at the Human, his concern had faded, "Alright - let's get ourselves out of this desert and into the bottom of a tall glass of something chilled."

---

The cantina was already alive despite the early hour; a low, throbbing hum of voices, clattering utensils and the occasional burst of laughter that felt almost wrong after what they had just walked away from. The air was thick with the smell of spiced caf, fried rootcakes and the faint tang of coolant leaking from an overworked condenser behind the bar. A holo‑screen flickered above the counter, cycling through local moisture forecasts and local trading data that no one seemed to be watching.

Rex and Mentis slipped into a corner booth without drawing so much as a glance. Their dust‑stained clothes and weary expressions blended seamlessly with the moisture farmers, haulers and early‑morning scoundrels who had already claimed their seats. Here, ruggedness was the default; nobody questioned it.

What struck Mentis most was the normality.

People chatted as though the next settlement over had not been reduced to a pile of smoking ash. A pair of traders argued over the price of a condenser coil. A Rodian laughed too loudly at a joke his companion barely finished. A group of farmhands nursed glasses of a bluish milk, muttering about the heat.

Any talk of Mos Entha was sparse and muted, with the detached resignation of people long accustomed to disaster.

"Yeah, I heard. Cryin’ shame, that," a grizzled Human at the bar said, shaking his head.

"Bound to happen eventually," his companion replied, barely looking up from his plate.

"GalactaWerks’ll blame the locals... or the climate. You know, same as always."

And then, as their drinks came, they moved swiftly on.

Mentis stared at them for a moment, trying to reconcile the casual indifference with the images still burned into his mind: the undead shuffling through the streets, the stench of rot and decay, the silence of the once normal city that had died corrupted and wrong.

He forced himself to focus on the plate in front of him. The food was bland, but he found himself eating quickly, almost hungrily. He had expected the carnage to turn his stomach, but instead his body demanded fuel, as though trying to anchor itself back in the living world.

Across from him, Rex wasn’t eating. He pushed the food around absently with his fork, eyes unfocused, jaw tight. The noise of the cantina washed over him without ever quite reaching him.

Mentis swallowed, watching him for a moment.

Then, quietly, he ventured,

"You want to talk about it?"

Rex didn’t look up.

Mentis continued, softer still, "It was your home, after all. And… while plenty of people can say their hometown was destroyed, I reckon not many can say they had to light the fuse that did it."

The words were not accusatory, not trying to upset, just an odd truth that tumbled from his slightly awkward mind.

Rex's eyes lifted briefly at the question, the corner of one eye creasing slightly as he processed the words. For a moment it looked as though he might answer immediately, but whatever thought had surfaced seemed to lose its footing somewhere before it reached his mouth.

Instead, he simply stared - not at Mentis, but past him, even past the cantina wall. The noise around them continued unabated, of course. Plates still rattled and chairs scraped. Somebody laughed too loudly near the bar. The holo-screen above the counter flickered through another set of podracing results.

Rex seemed barely aware of any of it, though. The walk across the desert had taken what little remained of him. His eyes were bloodshot beneath the grime still smeared across his face. Bruising had begun to bloom properly along his jaw and neck, whilst his shoulders sagged beneath the weight of exhaustion. Every movement carried the stiffness of somebody who had spent the last day being thrown through walls, nearly eaten and then hurled out of the sky.

Eventually, he rubbed a hand across his face and leaned back into the booth with a long sigh. The fork slipped from his fingers and clattered softly against the plate. For several seconds, he simply watched the other patrons moving about their evening. As Mentis had observed moments before, nobody seemed particularly interested in the fact an entire settlement had ceased to exist over the horizon.

Rex reached for his cup of blue milk. He lifted and held it, but still did not drink. His eyes still remained fixed on an unknown distance. When he did finally speak, his voice came out quieter than before.

"You know..." He paused, swallowing once. "My pa used to say you spend enough years out here, eventually every story sounds like weather." A faint unhappy smile spread across his face. "'Town got wiped out.' Weather. 'Raiders took somebody.' Weather. 'Mine collapsed.' Weather."

His gaze drifted briefly toward the door. For a moment, he looked genuinely awake again - only for the exhaustion to settle right back over him. Rex lowered the untouched drink to the table and rubbed at one eye.

Then, without looking at Mentis, he asked: "That new saber holdin' up alright?" His hand made a vague gesture. "After all the dust. Blood. Monster bits. Reactor explosions."

Mentis shrunk back a bit, not knowing whether to be pleased that Rex was starting to return to his dry humoured self. He brought his hand down to his side where the newly-crafted hilt lay, feeling its sharp edges and bare wiring against his sore fingers.

“It’s fine,” he answered hastily, before adding, “I mean, it will need a bit of tuning up to refine the plasma containment but, if it didn’t short out back in that hangar, I think the core components don’t need swapping out.”

He peered at Rex, wondering if Rex was thinking about his father’s symbolic peggat that sat as a core connector within the hilt.

He drew himself further forwards again, tenuously offering it back.

“You know, we can swap out the peggat for something else with similar conductivity,” his eyes looked at Mentis open and honest across the scuffed cantina table, “You know, I could remove it right now if you want.”

Rex looked up immediately. The reaction seemed to surprise even him. For a few moments, he simply stared across the table at Mentis, the offer hanging there between them whilst the noise of the cantina carried on around them. Slowly, some of the tension left his shoulders and he eased further back into the booth.

"Nah."

The answer came quietly, but there was no hesitation in it now. His eyes drifted down to where he knew the weapon was, in all its roughly-hewn glory.

"It's not just a piece of Mos Entha," he said. "I mean, sure, that's part of it, kark-hole that it was." A faint smile tugged briefly at one corner of his mouth before fading again. "But that's not really what matters. That thing was with my dad for years and didn't do anything, along with a hundred other things he kept insistin' that one day would be useful for somethin'. He used to say that about all sorts of kriff. Half the place was full of bits he swore would come in handy eventually. Most of it never did - you saw what happened to the rest of it." The smile returned, softer this time. "But turns out he was right about that one, I guess."

A couple of Gotal stepped into the cantina bleating loudly, drawing the ire of a few other patrons, including a rather dry-eyed Duros in grimy coveralls that had been at the bar before even Rex and Mentis arrived, offering half-drunken, half-hungover scowls to anyone that made too much noise.

"It survived Mos Entha and survived the workshop," Rex continued. "And now it's sittin' inside a weapon that helped save his son and his..." He paused awkwardly, his expression tightening slightly as he searched for a word that did not immediately make him want to climb under the table. "...friend."

The word landed with all the grace of a malfunctioning loader droid and Rex grimaced faintly.

"Anyway," he actively carried on. "Point is, he'd appreciate that. Probably appreciate it more than me carryin' it around in a pocket for another ten years."

The conversation settled briefly after that. Around them, the cantina continued doing what cantinas did. A pair of traders had now moved on from arguing about condenser coils to arguing about whose cousin had stolen one. Somebody near the bar was attempting to convince a Rodian that a particular swoop race had been fixed. The alleged destruction of Mos Entha had already become another story, another distant piece of bad news drifting around the Dune Sea.

Rex found himself watching them for a while before finally speaking again.

"What now?" The question was not directed entirely at Mentis. Part of it seemed aimed at the table, the drinks, or the galaxy itself. "We've got Brisck's data. We've got what we saw. We've got memories of a town that doesn't exist anymore and a crashed executive shuttle that's probably already surrounded by Jawas stripping it for parts." He rubbed at that eye again, his lids looking even heavier, now, and desperate for sleep. "And that's about it."

He picked up the cup at last and took a long drink before setting it back down, although he hiccoughed at the amount he took down his dry throat.

"Maybe that's enough," he just about managing, briefly covering his mouth with his hand. His eyes grew redder. "Maybe somebody actually cares what GalactaWerks was doin' down there." His gaze drifted briefly towards the window. "But then I look around this place." He looked back to the Rattataki. "I dunno. Maybe we're carryin' around proof the galaxy's sick, or maybe we're just carryin' around another story nobody wants to hear. It's hardly 'the Bast-ee-on Document."

Rex enunciated those last words very carefully in an affected accent, his tired derision not lost in the moment.

Mentis settled, thoughts less on the weight of the peggat and now thinking more about the one who had gifted it to him. Rex's sentiment was comforting and empowering all at once: turning something inert and unused into a force for good, for protection. That was so far from what his old saber had become to him, even if his original intentions with the weapon were noble. It was, perhaps, a chance to try again.

A little bell chimed behind the counter as another order was ready to be served. A slow humanoid serving droid wheeled over and slid the prepared tray onto its mechanised hand before scuttling off with it.

"Whatever happens with that knowledge," Mentis answered eventually, looking down, not ashamed of Rex's gaze but finding it easier to form his thoughts without the distraction, "The important thing is that we know what happened. But, if you want to, that intelligence agency droid on the ship might get the data into the right hands. Who knows, if leaked in the right way, it might just mean others won't suffer a similar fate. Or at least it will add to the pressure on them."

Rex gave the suggestion more consideration than his expression initially suggested. His eyes drifted away from Mentis and back towards the rest of the cantina as though the answer might be waiting somewhere amongst the traders, mechanics and labourers carrying on with their morning.

It struck him again that they were normal people. Ordinary people... the sort of people Mos Entha had been full of.

Eventually, Rex exhaled slowly through his nose.

"And hand it straight over to that creepy Duros?" His eyes narrowed slightly over the rim of the cup. "Another politician."

The words were not particularly angry - more tired, and he rolled the blue milk around his mouth thoughtfully before swallowing.

"Look, I get it. Hul talks a good game. Stoppin' corruption. Protectin' the little guy. Restorin' accountability. All that." He shrugged one shoulder. "Maybe some of it is even true." His gaze drifted briefly towards the tabletop. "But he's still in it for himself." The cup settled back down. "For votes and for power... For whatever version of the galaxy he thinks ought to exist when all this is over."

There was no great ideological conviction behind the statement or any grand political philosophy. Rex simply sounded like a man who had spent too much of his life watching important people promise things.

"Nah." He shook his head. "I think I'll keep it."

The statement surprised even him slightly as he said it aloud, but not because it was untrue - but because he had not realised he had already made the decision.

"We find out who Brisck was working with; we find the people he trusted enough to leave all this with in the first place." His fingers tapped lightly against the side of the cup. "The people who helped him get here before it went to kark."

The idea seemed to settle more comfortably the longer he spoke.

"We get it to the folks fightin' GalactaWerks because they lost somebody, because their town got poisoned or 'cause their kids got sick... Because they don't want another Mos Entha. The volunteers. The victims. The people actually livin' with the consequences." A faint smile tugged briefly at one corner of his mouth. "Not some fella in a fancy suit, or one standin' on a stage tellin' everybody how angry he is."

For a few moments he sat quietly again, listening to the ordinary noise of the cantina. Eventually, he leaned back into the booth and rubbed at his eyes again.

"Besides," he muttered, exhaustion finally beginning to overwhelm even his stubbornness, "if we're gonna save the galaxy, we should probably get some sleep first." His gaze settled briefly upon Mentis. "Reckon we've earned that much, at least."

The chatter around them became more distant, as though their booth was separating from the rest of the crowd as the air between the pair became more settled. Whether there was a right or wrong decision about how to handle the data they had secured, Rex had made a decision and the matter was settled.

"Your planet, your rules," Mentis smirked, daring to ease his cutlery back towards his plate of food, "For what it's worth, I think that is a pretty noble path to take."

The Rattataki pierced a rubbery root vegetable and brought it into the air, gently twirling it as he added, "You know, I've always found it quite a romantic notion to help the meek. I think, when I was very young, that is what I wanted to do, but that was before..."

He trailed off, grip suddenly stiffening before he quickly secreted the lingering vegetable into his mouth.

"Anyway, I think you're right," he smiled a little more sheepishly, "We've earned a little rest and relaxation. Know any spots?"

Rex opened his mouth to answer, but the words never arrived. Somewhere between the question and whatever reply had begun forming, the exhaustion that had stalked him since Mos Entha quietly won. Rex felt the warmth of the booth beneath aching muscles and bruises that seemed to have multiplied since they had sat down, his eyes growing heavier with every passing second. His breathing slowed and his head dipped almost imperceptibly forward before settling against the backrest, arms still loosely folded across his chest.

A few moments later, a faint, steady snore escaped him, quiet enough to disappear beneath the familiar murmur of the cantina.

Outside, dawn continued its slow advance across the desert, washing the settlement in pale gold whilst somewhere beyond the horizon the ashes of Mos Entha cooled beneath an empty sky. The peggat rested within Mentis' newly forged lightsaber, Brisck's data remained safely in their possession, and for the first time since landing on Tatooine, neither pursuit nor catastrophe demanded another step from them. Whatever came next, whether it was exposing GalactaWerks, finding those Brisck had trusted, or simply surviving another day together, could wait a few hours longer.

For now, there was only the quiet comfort of ordinary life continuing around them, and two weary travellers who, at long last, had found a place safe enough to close their eyes.

END

 

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