Star Wars: Blue Quartz/ Chapter 8: The Green-Eyed Monster

Chapter 8: The Green-Eyed Monster

Rex, Ponds, and Stone all spun to press their backs against the Med Bay door and impress their full weight upon it, tentacles flailing wildly through the open spaces around its seams. Patrick playfully tapped his ignited lightsaber at the tentacles, giggling gleefully as each scorched and retreated. It seemed he thought it was all a carnival game. Finally the three men were able to close the door and engage its heavy emergency bolts into place. All three men simultaneously hunched over, placing their hands on their knees, heaving deep breaths, wiping sweat from their brows.

"That... thing... was Bosnorth?"

"Yeah," Ponds added, coughing into the cold steel room around them. "He's looked better."

"I'm too old for this crap." Both Ponds and Rex turned their heads stare hard at Commander Stone. "What, we're monster hunters, now?"

"I knew I should've stayed retired." Rex muttered under his breath. "Patrick!"

"Yeah?" perked up the giant starfish, who had been entertaining himself poking at a fallen tentacle outside the Med Bay door.

"Anything comes through that door with more than four limbs, you cut it to pieces. You got it?"

Patrick looked quizzically at the Captain, then his eyes went up and to the left.

"Four?" he asked. Rex's strong, confident shoulders slumped slightly.

"Just-- anything. Okay?"

Patrick seemed to think a bit longer, then all concentration fell from his face as he shouted "Okay!" and leapt playfully in the air. Rex regarded his comrades and jutted his chin towards the control center. "Gentlemen, a word?"

The men shuffled soundlessly into the control room. As Rex closed the door at the end of the hallway leading to the Med Bay he shot one more quizzical look at Patrick, who'd gone back to poking at the sizzling tentacle stub on the floor. He shook his head as he turned to his two Commanders. "That's a new one."

"What is this? Do we have any idea?" asked Stone, removing his helmet and slamming it onto a nearby desk.

"No, sir. None," replied Ponds.

"Didn't you assign an indigenous guide to this outpost? It's Standard Operating Procedure for an outpost such as this," asked Rex, falling immediately into his natural role as leader and tactician.

"Of course, sir!" snapped back Stone.

"And?"

Both Ponds and Stone nodded their heads beyond him to the Med Bay.

He stared back at them blankly. "You've got to be kidding me!"

"I wish that were the case," Stone sighed.

"Any word from the team that went to meet with the Death Watch?"

Ponds led them upstairs to his scanner terminal. "None, sirs. There's no chatter from the planet's surface, as you can see."

Stone leaned in to look at a wave-like graphic representation of the last few hours of radio activity on the monitor. "Here." He pointed at small peaks in the flat line of inactivity. "What's this?"

Ponds shrugged his shoulders. "Interference. Wind, seismic activity, itinerant wildlife crossing the field of the scanners..."

"Mandalorian jammers," Rex said, plainly.

Ponds and Stone exchanged glances, then regarded the Captain.

"If the Death Watch were jamming the party's signals, it would look a lot like that."

Stone leapt on this revelation, "Ponds, can you trace the position of that interference?"

Ponds pressed a button on his wrist communicator, then drew his DC-15 Blaster Pistol and engaged its power cells. It hummed and whistled as it came to life.

"You're damned right, I can!"

--

As a heavily armed super commando held his pistols on the rest of the men, a rather exuberant Death Watch Trooper stood over Fil's writhing body, wrapped in the near-inescapable fibercord whip the latter had entwined him within. "I'd stop squirming if I were you; it'll only make it tighter."

"What is the meaning of this?" Carg demanded. The Trooper turned to face his accuser.

"I am Thon, of Mandalore; a warrior like my father and his father before him. And I intend to use this Blue Quartz to buy my way back to my rightful home. And this brutish compatriot of mine... Oh, where are my manners?" Thon sauntered casually to Carg and pulled his pistols from this holsters, tossing them over his shoulder. "Here we are having proper introductions and I've left you holding all this heavy weaponry, like groceries in the rain." He pointed his own blaster at Fil's head as he regarded the team as a whole. "You can all unburden yourselves of those weapons now, if you'd like."

"Like Hell--" Timin exclaimed before a blast knocked him through the chest and ended his comments forevermore. Carg and Gold Leader screamed aloud, but Thon inched his blaster closer to Fil's head to quiet them.

"My trigger-happy friend, here, is Qua Phorre, and he just loves killing clones. So let's all behave, shall we?"

"You're madmen! We have to stick together to stop the virus before it overtakes us all!" Carg shouted.

Thon laughed. "I certainly hope it does. That is what we designed it to do, after all."

"Why?" asked Fil, still rocking back and forth on the ground.

"To motivate you to find my Blue Quartz for me, obviously. And to render you speechless when I'm gone and any investigation is underway. You're friend didn't say much when he was trying to rip you all apart, did he?"

"Speaking of friends," Carg added loudly, as he pressed on his wrist communicator in rhythmic taps. "Our friend is escaping right now with your sabotaged leader, and they'll return with either her or my friends soon to put a stop to this."

"Well, then," said Thon, excitedly. "I guess you'd better get to digging; and quickly, my friends. I need that rock out of the ground before that happens!"