The transport hub in Mos Eisley sounded like a junkyard trying to argue with itself. Engines coughed, droids beeped, someone somewhere was frying something that definitely wasn't legal meat. The air was thick with heat, dust, and the stale buzz of too many tired people waiting for rides that might not show up.
I clanked my way up to the counter, the exo-frame's servos whining under the coat. Between the cooling fans humming inside the Iron Mule and the big shoulder pad that was secretly my turret, I probably looked like some off-world scavenger in budget bounty-hunter cosplay. Which was fine. No one on Tatooine asked questions unless they wanted to regret it.
The human behind the counter didn't even look up at first. He was hunched over a cracked datapad, the kind that looked like it had survived a sandstorm and lost. His name tag read JEK, though the letters were so faded it could have said JOT for all I knew.
"What," he grunted, voice thick with the kind of irritation only earned from too many years in one place.
"I'm looking for transport to Mos Taike," I said, keeping my tone level. The helmet speaker flattened my voice into something politely artificial. "I heard there's a shuttle headed that way."
He grunted again without looking up. "No idea. Check the board."
"I did," I said. "It's blank."
"Then no shuttle," he said. He finally looked up, and his eyes carried that special kind of local disdain reserved for anyone who wasn't stuck here permanently. "Try again next week."
I waited a beat, then quietly slid a few credit chips onto the counter. They made a soft clink against the metal, deliberate and obvious.
Jek's eyes flicked down to them, and his posture shifted just slightly. Not friendly, exactly, but interested. He tapped the edge of the top chip with a cracked fingernail.
"Suppose I could check the off-manifest runs," he muttered, thumbing at the datapad again. "Sometimes the board's late updating."
"Appreciate it," I said. "Just verifying some routes I heard about. Wanted to make sure the info's still good."
Never hurts to triple check your information, especially when one wrong shuttle could leave you dead, or worse, in Sarlacc pit...to be tentacled for eternity.
He squinted at the screen. "Mos Taike, you said? Huh. You're in luck. There's one hauler doing a freight run that way today. Once-a-week thing. Usually full of parts and the occasional fool with nowhere better to be." His eyes flicked up, measuring me. "You sure that's where you're headed?"
"Yeah," I said. "Then maybe Mos Espa after that. Trying to keep the schedule flexible."
Jek snorted. "Flexible's a good word for it. Between here and Taike you're fine, but anything beyond that's a whole chain of stops. From Taike you can catch a midday shuttle to Dustown, then one to Pika Oasis, maybe a layover in Wort Crossing if the pilot's sober and the engines hold. From there, you get the Bestine line, and that'll spit you near Espa if the winds aren't chewing through everything."
I let out a low whistle. "So it's still a five-hop nightmare."
He gave a dry laugh. "You could call it that. Around here, we just call it traveling."
I leaned my elbow on the counter. "Someone mentioned there's a faster way. Through the Jundland Wastes. Cuts out half those stops."
Jek's expression flattened, unimpressed. "Someone mentioned, huh? Let me guess, someone in a cantina?"
"Something like that."
He shook his head slowly. "Don't take travel advice from drunks. The Wastes are trouble lately. Even Jabba himself would prefer not going there. Real trouble. Folks say there's a new Tusken warlord out that way. Young one. Meaner than the rest, and smart too. He's been pushing hard on the other tribes, raiding caravans, even hitting settlements near the ridge line. Nobody's sure why, but it's got the whole stretch crawling with fighters."
Sounds like yet another routine thing to happen in between the Tuskens. Everything I had learned about them painted them nothing less than barbarians, and as such, the situation an usual one.
He scratched his chin with a sand-scuffed thumb, frowning. "No one's seen him close up, just heard stories. Some think he's not like the others. Talks more, fights harder. Whole thing's bad news."
Maybe that one got a droid teacher by chance. Not that it matters much, as I hoped to stay away from the whole shit pit. Such a bad charm Tuskens are, killing a few (dozens) led to the chosen one becoming a half-assembled lego.
"Lovely," I muttered. "So that shortcut's a fast way to end up in a sandpit."
"That's putting it nice. You go through there now, you'll be target practice before you clear the first dune. You want Mos Espa, stick to the shuttle chain. Slow, yes, but at least you get there in one piece."
"Scenic route it is, then." I slid the rest of the credits across. "One seat for each leg. Don't skimp on the oxygen filters."
Jek processed the payment and handed over a stack of flimsy tickets and a chipped token. "Here. First hop leaves in an hour. Platform C. Driver's a Rodian named Kiv. He's jumpy, but he gets there. Don't be late. The schedule's the only thing that runs on time around here."
"Platform C. Got it," I said, giving a slight nod.
"Right," Jek grunted, wiping down his counter with a greasy rag. "Try not to stand out. The less attention you attract, the better."
The twin suns hit like a pair of angry heat lamps the second I stepped back outside. The exo-frame's fans kicked into high gear, barely keeping me from turning medium-rare.
Four days. Five transfers. Zero chances of getting vaporized by sand maniacs. Terrible plan. But survivable.
And on Tatooine, that counted as a win.
__
The crate had about three seconds of airtime before it learned what catching hands meant.
I snatched it out of the air without opening my eyes, the Iron Mule's servos locking with a satisfied hiss. The old hauler bounced again—hard—and somewhere up front, cargo straps screamed for mercy they weren't going to get.
Right. Tatooine roads. Because why would anyone think to secure loose storage before driving like they're qualifying for the Boonta Eve Classic?
I cracked one eye open, checked that the crate wasn't leaking anything explosive, and set it beside my pack. The Iron Mule groaned as I shifted, metal joints flexing like an old man's knees. Comfort wasn't its strong suit. Sitting in it felt like being clamped into a rusty bear trap, but when I locked the joints, it gave me decent back support. A small mercy in a galaxy that didn't hand out many.
The shuttle was the kind of vehicle you got when someone decided a sandcrawler was too luxurious. Boxy, sealed, loud. The repulsors coughed instead of humming, and every few minutes something in the hull made a sound that was either expansion metal or the structural integrity giving up on life. No windows, no viewports—just dim yellow strip lights flickering overhead.
I had no idea where we were. Could've been heading to Mos Taike. Could've been heading to a pit full of womp rats.
The pilot up front—a Rodian, if I remembered right—kept the throttle heavy. From the sound of it, we were either flying low over dunes or skimming the edge of a canyon. I hoped the former.
Aside from me, there were four other warm bodies. Two moisture farmers who looked like they'd been cooked medium-well by the suns, both of them clutching satchels like they contained their last hopes. A Rodian woman wrapped in a faded scarf, keeping one hand inside her coat where I could feel her blaster.
Before anyone accuses me of non-ethical usage of my abilties on the women, first, Ew, No offense to Rodians, but they look ugly. Vasha had set the bar too high for me to even care for 99 percent of the girls in Star Wars.
Second, I am an innocent boy, pure as an milk. I haven't even jerked off in years...
Well anyways, the last passenger was a droid that had been rebuilt from at least three different models—its plating mismatched, one optical sensor flickering like a dying candle. Where was it going without its master, or hell, if it even had a master, was unknown. Maybe it could be an free droid for all the Force cares.
All of them kept quiet. The kind of quiet that comes from people who don't want to be noticed.
It was more than fine by me.
I went back to what I was doing before the crate tried to pick a fight. Meditation, though my version of it would make a Jedi weep.
My attention drifted to my right hand, where a faint heat bruise pulsed under the glove. It still ached if I moved it wrong, a slow reminder of a mistake that could've gone terminal and left me without an usable limb in best case.
Two days ago, I'd been refitting the blaster into the Predator mount, half-distracted and overconfident. I'd pulled the focusing cell without fully venting the chamber. There must've been some gas left in the barrel, because the moment I cracked the housing—whump—the leftover pressure ignited.
A half-formed bolt spat out and nearly turned my hand into modern art.
If the mag had still been loaded, I'd be missing fingers, maybe worse. Thank the Force for small miracles and paranoid habits.
Now, as the freighter rocked and rattled, I let my awareness settle on the bruise. The Force flowed through it like water around a stone—disrupted, uneven. The natural rhythm of the cells was off as similar to last time. I called it their natural frequency, though the term was half metaphor, half something else. Every living thing, including my cells vibrated in harmony with the Living Force, humming in its own key. Injury knocked that harmony out of tune.
The bruise hummed too high, angry and chaotic.
My research in midichlorian transfusion had been going as good as rivers in a desert. Even after weeks of poking, prodding, and late-night datapad sessions, I was no closer to a breakthrough. Made me wonder if it was even possible. Maybe there was a fundamental law, baked into the Force itself, that stopped anyone from tampering too deeply with it. Like gravity, but metaphysical—an invisible hand that smacked you every time you got too curious.
And I didn't exactly have peers to consult. No midichlorian biologists were hanging out on Tatooine, sipping caf and swapping notes about the building blocks of life energy. The closest thing I had to a reference was the story of Darth Plagueis the Wise.
If you could even call it a story.
A Sith Lord so brilliant he supposedly learned to manipulate life and death itself—and still ended up murdered in his sleep by his own apprentice. Not exactly confidence-inspiring. For all I knew, the tale was propaganda, a bedtime story Palpatine cooked up to seduce a moody teenager into cosmic fascism.
But if there was truth in it, if Plagueis really had touched the edge of that power, then why hadn't he gone further? Why couldn't he make himself more powerful, harder to kill, harder to end?
If talking about Force techniques that already existed in canon Star Wars, the first thing to come to mind was Force Drain.
It sounded like the thing I was looking for, but at the same time it didn't. From what I knew, it was a way to siphon the life out of someone else—stealing vitality, not reshaping it. Every account described it as predatory, parasitic. You take energy, the other thing dies, and you walk away feeling full for a few minutes before the Force kicks you in the conscience.
Nowhere had I read about it interacting directly with midichlorians. It was all surface-level. No one really knew whether it touched the source or just the flow. But still, it was one of the few techniques that even brushed against the concept of manipulating life energy itself.
The other was Force Healing.
It was the supposed light side mirror of Drain — patching wounds instead of ripping them open. But the problem was, no one actually agreed on how it worked. Some texts I read in past life hinted it was about aligning one's body with the Force's flow, letting it "restore what was lost." Which sounded nice and poetic, but meant nothing in practice.
If it really involved channeling the Living Force from one organism into another, that raised a question: how did they heal themselves? You can't exactly donate your own energy to yourself — it's like trying to lift a speeder by standing on it.
So either Force Healing drew from a different mechanism entirely, or every Jedi healer was secretly breaking some fundamental law of energy conservation.
I didn't buy the idea of them just "letting the Force guide the mending." Too vague. Too convenient. Maybe it wasn't about energy transfer at all, but about command. Like maybe telling the cells to rewrite their own directives — reallocate resources, accelerate recovery.
It could also just be the Force jump-starting the body's metabolism, pushing it into overdrive until the cells knit themselves back together. A biological fast-forward button. The same way those speedsters in old holocomics healed after running through walls—because their cells were working ten times faster than they should.
Still, that was just another guess in a growing pile of them. No data. No proof. Just theories built on other theories, all stacked on sand. It'd take years—decades maybe—to test each one properly, to see which held up under a microscope instead of a meditation trance.
And that's assuming any of them were true.
Maybe all of them were wrong.
I didn't have the luxury of a galactic holonet to fact-check metaphysics. No "ten things you didn't know about Force biophysics" article waiting for me out there. Just me, a busted datapad, and a galaxy that didn't care.
Still, as I focused on the injured patch of skin, watching the way the Force flowed through it like a glitched frequency display, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was close. The distortion wasn't random—it had a pattern. A wrong note in a melody I almost recognized.
It was like standing at the edge of an equation, one variable short of balance. I could feel the answer brushing against the edges of my mind, infuriatingly near yet just beyond reach.
Close enough to taste.
But not close enough to understand.
Another bump. Another lurch. The crate beside me wobbled again, but my uninjured hand, warned by the hyper-perception bubble, nudged it back before it could fall.
I didn't let the bubble drop anymore. Couldn't.
In the last two days alone, I'd been threatened three times, robbed twice, and offered "cheap power converters" by a kid who definitely had a knife under his cloak. And that was inside Mos Eisley, the so-called civilized part of Tatooine.
This planet made the backstreets of London look like a temple retreat.
So yeah, I kept the bubble on. Small, tight, but always humming at the edge of awareness—just enough to feel the air shift, the metal flex, the heartbeat of anyone stupid enough to sneak too close.
I took a breath, felt the Iron Mule adjust its stance with a faint mechanical sigh. The shuttle kept rumbling forward, direction unknown, destination hopefully correct.
Just a few more hours of blind trust and bad suspension. Then, if luck held, Mos Taike.
If not… well.
There were worse ways to die than in motion.
---
[Images of my trip!]
A/N: I thank the readers for their patience and understanding. Hope you enjoyed the chapter. There is an hidden detail/foreshadowing in the chapter, if you can catch it.
And this fic is running low on stones, hope you guys can thrown in as much as possible, afterall getting stoned is a very good feeling.
And join discord for early announcements! Many a times its not feasible/good to do small announcements by making a chapter here, so I do it there.