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Korval Burke had spent the better part of his forty-five years of life on the rim. In those forty-five years he has seen everything from tired, shopworn freighters, to sleek fighters of the rebellion. He has even come across the mighty, mile long Star Destroyers of the Imperial Navy and lived to tell the tale. Today, however, is different.
The bridge of the corvette The Buccaneer’s Bride was quiet. Her bridge crew sat silent. Broken. She has been sitting relatively motionless in space for half an hour. The hulking colossus that had dragged them from hyperspace half an hour ago still sat exactly 1,545 km away. 1,545km is precisely the same distance that separated the two craft a half an hour earlier, despite the constant thrust of the Buc’s (the name her crew had adopted) ion drives.
Outside the aging corvette an ancient construct dominated the local starscape. A ring, then thousand meters across and painted a menacing red held the corvette in its grasp. The inner five thousand meters of its structure was no structure at all. Tractor beams emanating from five two thousand meter towers glowed a sickly green as they held the Buc in their grasp. A handful of turbo laser bolts from yet another in a countless series desperate volleys of fire from the Buc’s turrets bounced harmlessly off of the ancient relic.
Burke slumped back into his chair and sighed. The tall, ragged Correllian thumbed the scar that ran from the top of his left cheekbone to his chin where it became obscured by a curly red goatee. Glancing down at his console, he growled. “This shit isn’t getting us anywhere. T’kel’tu, where exactly is the tractor beam trying to pull us?”
The Twi’lek with a single head-tail manning his station a few meters to the left returned met his Capitan’s eye. “Directly into the center of the ring.”
“And the status of that thing’s reactors?”
“According to my calculations, they go critical in 10 minutes Cap. Hmmph.... Those reactors have got to be thousands of years old….”
Burke raised his hand to silence his opining sensor chief. “Well I have no plans of sitting here and riding that shockwave. We’re going to try something…different. Bring us about and cut the engines. Lets ride the beam to where it wants to take us. I want those engines ready to fire up again on may mark as soon as those tractor beams cut off” [i]If they cut off [/i]he added in his thoughts.
The nervous crew hesitated for a moment, thoughts of mutiny momentarily were entertained by a few…. but only for a moment. This was the man who led then out of a hostile encounter with an Imperial Star Destroyer barely months before. Dutifully, the engines were idled. The ship slipped forward.
“Cap! The disc!” The one tailed twi’lek nearly jumped from his post. “Power readings just jumped off the scale….and the reactors, the decay is accelerating. What the…Cap if I didn’t know better I’d say some kind of singularity is forming inside the disk!”
“Sir, ETA to disk…. 10 seconds” the Rodian helmsman chimed in.
“Time to see if this works…stand by engines on my mark. Ready…”
Without warning Capitan Burke’s words were interrupted by pain. Pain that drove even the middle aged pirate to screams like that of a child. He felt his ship rocket forward as he sat unable to move. Pinpricks of brilliant white light filled his field of vision and were soon replaced with black nothingness as he lost consciousness.
