Dying Inside

Posted on Sun May 10th, 2026 @ 4:06pm by Mentis & Kalen "Rex" Vickers
Edited on on Sun May 10th, 2026 @ 4:43pm

3,522 words; about a 18 minute read

Chapter: Chapter VIII: Broken Chains
Location: GalactaWerks Spaceport, Mos Entha
Timeline: Dusk/Early Night

Rex did not waste time celebrating. By the time Mentis had finished speaking, he was already moving. He dropped to one knee beside the exposed wiring nest, Cindra set down within arm's reach but forgotten for now as both hands went straight to the device. Up close, it was worse than the datapad had suggested. This was not a clean system - not even a desperate one. It was layered, patched, rerouted over itself again and again, as though multiple people had tried to fix the same problem and none of them had trusted the last.

"Yeah," he muttered, more to himself than to Mentis, fingers already working through the outer casing, prying back a panel with the edge of his knife. "That’s it. That’s the whole ugly thing."

A faint wave of heat rolled off the core as he exposed it further, subtle but wrong, like standing too close to a running engine that had been pushed well past where it should have been. The reinforced cable feeding into it thrummed with a low, uneven pulse, light stuttering along its length toward the device at the centre.

A few paces from the central device, half-buried beneath a scatter of stripped components and discarded tools, a thin folio lay open across the floor. It did not belong with the rest of it. The pages were not datapad-slick or uniformly printed, but rough, marked by hand in tight, uneven script that had been corrected, overwritten, amended in the margins as though the writer had been thinking faster than they could keep up with.

Mentis' gaze caught on it despite himself. The header was scrawled rather than typed, underlined twice with a heavy, impatient stroke.

DESPOT PROJECT

Below it, the writing fractured into blocks of notes, observations, and aborted conclusions. Physiology references, growth rates, neural compliance, and repeated mentions of "viability under stress" and "command integration failure". Whole sections had been struck through so aggressively the page beneath had nearly torn, only to be rewritten again in tighter, more deliberate lines.

One passage had been boxed off separately, as though the author had wanted it seen.

Bio-organic weapons enforcement viable but inefficient at scale. Resource-intensive. Unpredictable deviation under prolonged exposure. Industrial divisions remain primary investment vector. Greater yield. Greater control. Scaleable. Less 3R oversight.

Beneath that, a final note had been added later, the handwriting more hurried, the ink pressed deeper into the page.

Final Authority requires presence, not spectacle.

"Hyperdrive bleed's still active," Rex then went on, interrupting Mentis' reading as his jaw tightened. "Cooling system's barely holding it together." He exhaled through his nose, shaking his head once. "We're too late. It’s already cooking." He reached in, adjusting one of the regulator clamps, then another, forcing a temporary bypass that caused the pulsing light to steady for a fraction of a second before dropping again into that same uneven rhythm. "I can slow it," he said, louder now, a note of strain creeping in. "Buy us a bit more time. Not fix it, though. Not properly. Manual reset's gonna need full access, and that probably means restoring some of that main power that's off." His eyes flicked up briefly, then back to the device as he worked. "But this…" He tightened the last clamp, watching the readout stabilise just enough to be survivable. "This'll keep it from blowing in the next few minutes... Maybe."

He leaned back slightly on his heel, wiping a streak of sweat and grime across his mouth with the back of his hand, breathing still uneven.

"If we want outta here," he went on, glancing toward the dormant terminals lining the walls, "we need that power. Bring the grid back up, we can access whatever's left on the network. Executive bays, flight logs - anything that might still fly or I can fix."

His gaze shifted then, following the heavy cable that fed into the failsafe, tracking it away from the nest and across the floor - but it did not stop at the device. It ran further, disappearing into the far wall where a secondary conduit had been torn open and redirected. From there, it fed straight into a sealed section of the room Rex had not noticed on entry. A blast door, thick and reinforced, sat recessed into the structure, its seams dark, its surface marked with the same industrial scoring as the rest of the facility.

Only this one had not been forced. It had been kept closed.

"Anything, uhh, anything at the main console, Mantis?" The Human's eyes did not move from the blast doors, but he gestured at the oversized computer and terminal nearby, where the console still flickered with a basic supply of power.

Mentis was drawn away from the notes on the ground at the prompt like a teacher addressing a daydreaming student. He shook his head, trying to suppress the ominous scrawling, and looked over towards the console.

"Right," he mumbled, "The console."

He stepped forwards, weaving through the nest of cables. As he passed the large blast door, his foot caught under a wire. Wrenching it back out, he tugged over a toolbox and a small arc wrench clattered out, skittering across the floor with a sharp clatter.

He froze. The silence that followed was almost too quiet, as though the room itself was holding its breath for what came next.

From behind the sealed blast door came the faintest of responses. It was not a movement or voice, but a shift just barely perceptible to him in the Force. His heart sunk as he thought on the words he had just read: 'Final Authority requires presence, not spectacle.'

Something was behind there. It felt like a presence held in suspension: not asleep, not dead, but waiting for permission to move.

His muscles tightened, but he forced himself to look away. Whatever it was was not the issue. Not yet. He glanced back at Rex, who had now returned to the wiring, unaware of the shift in the room as he continued tackling the hyperspace bleed.

Momentarily, he considered if he should voice what he had sensed but dismissed it and turned back to the console. With another, more careful step, he was at the terminal. The screen flickered weakly under the backup power, only offering basic diagnostics. He brought up the route menu and ran a basic scan.

"Looks like main power has been cut at the grid level, specifically isolating this bay..." Mentis read the findings out loud, "I think I can re-connect it to the grid but won't be able to isolate it to one system."

He turned his head back, sweeping cautiously over the door before settling on Rex,

"All systems will re-activate simultaneously."

Rex refused to let his eyes draft back over the door as he completed some invisible calculations in his mind - the kind he had regularly completed as a smuggler and in his more recent guise as a plus-one to the Red Raptor crew and their mad adventures. This one, though, was entirely on him.

"Uhh... Yeah, yeah. Sure. Just do it." Again, he intentionally kept his eyes away from the mysterious door, even though he was clearly gripped by another 'bad feeling' about the whole situation. "We're not exactly flush with options." He looked to the door that they had entered by quickly and then half back to Mentis, and half to the failsafe setup. "You... you reckon it's far to the actual bay?"

There was a weak hope in his tone. They had not even yet secured a ship, let alone determined if any of them had been left serviceable.

"I can't know for certain," Mentis wavered, "But I reckon we should follow the corridor back into the facility and hope the next branch takes us to a bay containing something with enough lift to get us out of the blast range... However far that actually is..."

He turned back and began punching commands into the terminal. He opened the power control system and was greeted with a spider diagram of the various systems that could receive power, immediately spying the branch that had been disconnected - the one they were currently standing in.

Again, he felt that lurching dread as his finger hovered above the prompt to re-connect to the main grid. There was a very good reason the power was out and he really did not want to find out what that reason was.

"All right..." he announced, steeling himself, "Let's do it."

His finger tapped down hard and, for a moment, there was only a faint whirring sound that answered. He looked back at Rex who had momentarily paused with the grim suspense.

Then, a heavy clunk. Power conduits physically re-aligning and the boards before them flashed to life with full power. The terminal before him reset, blinking off and on again, displaying a GalactaWerks logo before it began to load the full control centre operating system. Mentis saw the panel before Rex also burst to life, casting a bright light at the Human that made him squint.

"Any better?" Mentis asked, nervously, "Do we still have time?"

Rex hissed softly through his teeth as the sudden light flooded across the control room, one hand coming up instinctively to shield his eyes whilst the other remained buried elbow-deep within the opened maintenance panel. The systems around them groaned back into motion one by one, old fans coughing into life overhead and somewhere deeper in the facility a distant hydraulic mechanism began cycling for the first time in what sounded like days.

"Yeah, that's... that's better," he muttered, blinking hard against the glare as lines of data finally cascaded properly across the screen before him instead of the fragmented mess he had been wrestling with before. "Kark, okay... okay, good." His fingers moved quickly now, far more confident with full access restored. He pulled up the thermal routing diagram first and immediately grimaced. "No, not good. Worse than I thought."

The heat bloom around the jury-rigged hyperdrive core had spread far beyond the initial containment mechanism. The cooling system was active again now, but sluggishly, several failing to respond at all whilst others flickered erratically between operational states.

"Left it too long," Rex said quietly, more focused now than panicked. "I've bought us time, but not much. Cooling loop's degraded. This whole thing’s balancing on bent wire and wishful thinking. Worse than the Janna." He swallowed once, jaw tightening as another warning icon flashed amber, even the mention of his old ship slipped by quickly, not even a dark glower at Mentis offered up. "We need that manual reset before the reaction cascades completely or this place is gone."

Another sound interrupted him then, as a low mechanical thud echoed through the room, from behind the sealed blast door. The room seemed to contract around the noise. Somewhere within the walls, relays clicked into new positions as dormant systems continued waking throughout the facility. The thick cable feeding into the sealed section pulsed brighter now.

Thud.

The reinforced locking bars on the blast door shifted by a fraction.

Rex stared at it this time. Fully.

"...oh no."

The lights above the sealed section flickered from red to amber.

Containment Active

The words blinked weakly through grime-clouded panels and then another line appeared beneath them.

PROJECT DESPOT
STASIS FAILURE

The room gave a sudden violent shudder as something struck the other side of the door hard enough to buckle the metal inward for half a second before it settled back into place with a shriek of protesting steel. Klaxons started to blare as the main lighting failed once again in the control room - this time, it was an emergency process taking hold, as a singular spinning golden light flooded the room, lighting up their fearful faces intermittently.

Rex recoiled instinctively, snatching his blaster back into his hand as every survival instinct he possessed immediately began screaming at him to leave.

"Mentis..." he began, voice suddenly very flat, very serious, eyes never leaving the blast door now.

A deep hydraulic hiss erupted from the frame - locks disengaging, one by one.

The first seal released with a deafening clang.

Mentis' eyes shot immediately back to the door and the presence he had felt before immediately strengthened. It was no longer waiting. It was active and knew they were there.

The second seal released with a grinding metallic groan, and a plume of freezing vapour spilled across the floor. The blast door shuddered, its reinforced frame trembling as internal hydraulics forced it wider.

Then a hand pushed through. It was enormous: Wookiee‑sized, but wrong. The fingers were too long, the knuckles swollen and plated with something not quite bone, but not quite metal. Sparse, scorched fur clung to patches of greyed skin stretched too tight over bulging tendons. Claws scraped against the inner frame, carving deep gouges as the limb strained for purchase.

Mentis’ stomach dropped.

He lunged for the control panel, slamming his palm against the screen as he tried to search for whatever command would halt the opening door. But the screen merely flickered, lines of code stuttering as the system continued its reboot cycle.

"No! Damn it!" he growled, "Come on!"

But his curses did nothing to speed up the cycle and he was forced to turn away as the third seal blew with a more violent bang than the first two. The clawed hand was now helping the hydraulics, dragging the door wider with brute strength.

The gap widened and Mentis caught a glimpse of dark, pupil-less eyes peering out, through the thinning cryogenic vapour and thin lines of long pointed teeth. There was a trace of the Blackwing contagion on it but it was altered and refined. Not decay but deliberate design indicated by the tubes seemingly fitted into its very flesh. Whatever it was, this Project Despot, it struck Mentis with overwhelming, guttural fear.

He threw both hands toward the door and pushed with the Force. The blast door slowed against his resistance for a heartbeat, its metal groaning and hydraulics straining. But the thing behind it pushed harder. The frame buckled outward and Mentis felt his Force grip slipping as though he was trying to grasp an oil slick ledge.

"Rex!" he shouted, voice cracking, "I can't stop this door now the power's back. Can you do that reset thing now?"

For a second, Rex did nothing. The words passed through him, clean and useless, while his body remained locked in place with Cindra half-raised and his eyes fixed on the widening seam of the blast door.

The thing behind it pressed forward again. Metal shrieked and rolled across the floor in a cold white sheet, curling around Rex's boots and swallowing the lower half of the room. In the turning of the emergency light, he saw too much and not enough: the long hand braced against the doorframe, the clawed tips biting into reinforced steel, the wet pull of cables and tubes flexing beneath its skin, the pale glimmer of eyes set too deep in a face that should not have belonged to anything living.

His breath snagged as Mentis shouted his name again. He turned back to the failsafe with a jerking motion, almost dropping the blaster as he shoved it down beside the panel and forced both hands into the opened guts of the machine.

"Yeah," he forced out, though his voice barely sounded like his own. "Yeah, I heard you!"

His fingers slipped on sweat and coolant residue as he dragged the manual reset housing forward. The interface had changed under full power, locks and warnings unfolding across the small screen faster than he could read them. Corporate safeguards and automated threat protocols trying to protect a facility already busy eating itself alive.

"Come on, come on...!" He hissed, stabbing through the menus with one hand whilst the other traced the physical routing beneath. "You smug corporate piece of..."

Another seal blew behind him and the sound hit like a detonation. Rex flinched despite himself, shoulder striking the edge of the panel hard enough to send pain flashing down his arm. Behind him, the door gave another tortured groan as Mentis held it for one impossible moment longer, but Rex could hear the thing now.

It was not roaring or shrieking dramatically - just breathing. Huge, wet, controlled breaths through a mouth that did not close properly, each one carrying a low vibration that seemed to travel through the floor and into his bones.

Somsjow,he found the reset relay. It was not where it should have been. Someone had cut it out of the original loop and fed it through an auxiliary line, then back through the cooling stack and into the hyperdrive bleed like a man trying to make a bomb think it was still an engine.

"Absolute lunatics," Rex grumbled, panic bleeding into his low tone.

The warning icon then flashed red - a galactically-accepted brand of warning.

CRITICAL THERMAL REACTION IMMINENT

Rex's stomach dropped so hard he almost laughed. Without really thinking, he jammed his knife into the relay casing and twisted. "Not dying in here," he muttered, voice shaking now, anger and terror braided together so tightly he could no longer tell them apart. "Not in some Company basement. Not for your stupid little secret."

He crossed the reset leads by hand.

MANUAL RESET ACCEPTED

COOLING LOOP RESTORED

THERMAL REACTION DELAYED

"Ha," he breathed, a broken little sound of triumph dragged out of panic. "Ha! Got you."

The victory lasted less than a heartbeat. Behind him, Mentis cried out with effort as the blast door tore wider.

Rex risked one look - it was coming through.

The head emerged first, bowed beneath the frame, all wet hide and ragged fur and a jaw ruined by its own teeth. They grew too long for the mouth, splitting the lips, pushing the face out of shape until its expression became something between a snarl and a wound. One side of the skull was plated with thick, uneven scales that continued down over the shoulder, whilst the other carried clumps of pale, filthy fur stuck to grey skin. Beneath both, the flesh moved in slow, impossible ripples, as though muscle and sinew were sliding over one another in layers.

Then the larger arm forced itself free. It was monstrous, even beside the rest of it. Overgrown and overweighted - a crushing claw of bone and keratin and swollen tissue, built less to cut than to pin and break. Tubes tore from its back as it dragged itself forward, black fluid spraying in ropes across the floor and steaming where it struck the warmed metal.

Mentis thrust a final surge of energy at the door but found himself reeling away as, with a great groan, the final seal was torn off. The sound exploded like a ballistic projectile in the room and now, with no further resistance, this creature, the Despot, pushed the rest of the blast door aside and pulled itself fully into the room and paused for just a moment as its slack, razor toothed jaw swung just behind the rest of its head as it swept across the room. It seemed to register Mentis primarily and took a firm, measured step towards the Rattataki.

Rex snatched Cindra up and scrambled backward from the panel, one hand still half-numb from the current of the wiring he had been mangling. The creature's milky eyes shifted, not wandering or confused, but fixing first on Mentis and then, with horrible certainty, on him.

"Oh," Rex said thinly, raising the blaster with a trembling hand. "Kriff."

The Despot's split mouth opened wider and a low sound rolled out of it, not quite a growl and not quite speech, and the loose flesh around its jaw pulled against the teeth that had already torn it apart.

Rex fired once on instinct and the bolt struck its upper chest and vanished into dense, shifting tissue with a flash of smoke and black fluid. The creature rocked back by half an inch - and then the wound began to close!

Rex's face went slack.

"...yeah," he whispered.

As the horror sank in, suddenly Mentis was at his side, having dived through the mass of wires to reach him.

Pulling the Human up off the floor, Mentis' breathing was tight and rapid.

"Get up, come on!" he edged them both towards the exit passageway as he ignited his stuttering blue blade as a guard in front of them, "There's nothing to do but run!"

The creature's eyes shot to the weapon, flashing with some primal or pre-programmed understanding of what it meant. It's whispery growl grew lower and louder as it looked set to pounce at them.

Now, as the hyperdrive’s collapse crept ever closer, the regenerating experiment stepped forward - the final obstacle between them and any hope of escape from Mos Entha.

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