Chapter 69: Breaking Point

Disclaimer: Star Wars and all of it's Intellectual Properties is owned by George Lucas and Walt Disney, This fictional work and all of it's original characters are however mine.

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Jake's P.O.V. :

Rina’s warning hit the comms like a stun blast—urgent, clipped, not leaving room for argument.

“Stop whatever you’re doing. Now.”

The urgency in her voice made my gut clench, and for a split second, I considered hitting the emergency kill-switch on the controls we were inspecting. But without knowing what exactly we were stopping, shutting things down blindly might make things worse.

I turned to the others. “Before we do anything else, I wanna double-check if the station’s security droids are online. If they are, and if we tripped some kind of protocol, we need to know what we’re dealing with.”

Kado crossed his arms. “Can we check that from here?”

I shook my head. “Nope. We need to get back to the security office.”

That earned a deep frown from him. “Then what happens if those droids are online and they don’t buy our fake IDs?”

I smirked. “First of all, technically, our credentials aren’t fake.”

Kado narrowed his eyes. “I fail to see the difference.”

“The difference is,” I said, leaning against the console, “we didn’t just slap together some surface-level forgery. I pulled the real logs and slotted us in as actual station staff. If the security droids do a surface scan, we’re fine. If they dig deeper, we’re still fine. Technically, we’re employed.”

Kado sighed through his nose. “I don’t like how much emphasis you put on technically.”

“Hey, it's better than blatantly.”

Davik, who had been quiet up until now, finally spoke up. “Alright, but that doesn’t answer the real question—what about Rina’s warning? What if it’s not about the droids?”

That was the part gnawing at me. I tapped my fingers against the console, considering. “If it were the security droids, I feel like she would’ve said something directly about them. Instead, she just told us to stop whatever we were doing.” I exhaled. “My bet? It’s about the giant, dumbly named machine.”

Kado scoffed. “That kriffing thing?”

“Think about it,” I said, shifting my weight. “We just got the controls. We were about to lower it. Then she called.”

“That is a bad coincidence,” Davik admitted.

Kado shook his head. “Bad coincidence or not, if something’s wrong, we need to know why.”

That kicked off some back-and-forth. The main debate: should we double-time it back to the security office right now to check the droid situation, or should we stay put and wait for Mira and Rina to rendezvous with us?

Davik leaned toward staying put. “If they’re warning us about something, they might have more to say when they get here. Running off might just split us up worse.”

Kado, predictably, wanted the security office checked yesterday. “If the station’s security is coming down on us, we need to know before it’s too late.”

I sat on the fence for a second, but in the end, I agreed with Davik. “We wait. We’re better off hearing them out before making any moves.”

Kado huffed, clearly unhappy, but didn’t argue.

With that decided, I leaned against the console, arms crossed, watching the hallway.

Hopefully, we weren’t already out of time.

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While we waited for Mira, Rina, and my two other clankers, I double-checked the controls. Again.

Did I properly abort the lowering process? Yeah, looked like it. But I wasn’t taking chances—I was making kriffing sure. Last thing I needed was some catastrophe getting pinned on me because I thought I stopped it instead of knowing I did.

And yes, I said when something happens, not if. Because I was pretty sure Kado’s jinx was working overtime right now.

The waiting dragged. A few minutes turned into at least an hour. Not that I was counting—okay, maybe I was, but mostly because I was expecting the others to come sprinting in with blasters firing, droids blasting, and some new horror on their heels.

For once, we were happy to be wrong.

The second Mira and Rina reached us—without running for their lives—there was a moment where we all just exhaled. A rare thing, given our usual luck.

Didn’t last long, though.

Mira wasted no time filling us in. Turns out, from my message alone, they’d worked out the timing of when I started lowering the machine. And at that exact moment, the giant sealed door to the disposal chamber had started opening.

Yeah. Not a coincidence.

“If my guess is right,” I muttered, rubbing my temple, “then every other chamber with a sealed door would’ve opened too.”

Davik gave me a side-eye. “You got a real comforting way of talking, kid.”

Rina folded her arms. “Jake’s got a point. If those doors are part of some emergency failsafe—”

“—then that means lowering the machine will open normally locked and sealed bulkheads and if there are accidents could’ve compromised the station’s systems.” I finished the thought, grimacing. “Which means we just dodged a real nasty mess.”

A pause. Then Kado, deadpan: “So what I’m hearing is that we don’t touch anything.”

I huffed a laugh. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Mira nodded, then pulled up the security footage they’d found earlier, plus an additional personal recording from Velen Ral, the station’s head of research. The first part? Stuff we’d already heard—how the Sith Hunters kept going rogue for no karking reason, how the Republic kept bringing them back to be ‘fixed,’ and how this station had gotten one such rogue droid to dissect.

But the new recording? That was where things got real interesting.

Ral’s voice came through the audio log, sounding tired, nervous—like a man already expecting his own death sentence. He spoke about how they couldn’t figure out why the Sith Hunters turned, no matter how much they scrubbed the code. The droids weren’t programmed to rebel. They weren’t hacked. No external control.

Yet still, they turned.

And the common factor?

A red Kyber crystal.

Not installed that way.

Ral confirmed what I was already suspecting—the Kyber crystal in the recovered Sith Hunter wasn’t red when they built the droid. It turned red.

The longer they studied it, the worse things got. The station became a powder keg, tempers exploding into full-blown violence. A murder even happened right under their noses. Ral was convinced it was all because of the corrupted crystal, but no one believed him.

Not until it was too late.

The log ended abruptly—blaster fire cutting off Ral’s last words.

By the time the audio clicked off, the whole room had gone quiet.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Then Kado whistled low. “That’s... worse than I thought.”

“Way worse,” Rina muttered, rubbing her arms like she was shaking off a chill.

Davik shifted, crossing his arms. “Alright. First priority’s obvious.”

I nodded. “Destroy the corrupted Kyber crystal. Safely.”

“If it can be safely destroyed,” Kado added.

Yeah. That was the real problem, wasn’t it? The more I thought about it, the more this felt eerily similar to what we ran into back on Malachor V. That same subtle corruption, the way it could twist people, turn them violent, make them lose control.

And if this crystal worked the same way... then getting rid of it wasn’t gonna be as easy as just shooting it.

I exhaled through my nose, mind racing. “Alright. We need a game plan. Because if this thing is even half as bad as Malachor...”

Rina finished for me, voice grim. “Then we’re standing in the middle of a ticking time bomb.”

No one argued.

Because we all knew she was right.

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We were moving fast. Back to the security office. No time to waste. No time to slow down.

I could explain every reason why we were doing this, lay out every calculation, but let’s be honest—half the stuff we did barely made sense even with context. So, for now? Summary time.

With everyone in agreement, I keyed my comm. “Tarek, launch the Stellar Envoy.”

A pause. Then static cracked as his voice came through. “Wait, what? Launch the ship?”

“Yeah, get it in the air. Preferably behind the biggest wreck out there.”

Tarek, understandably, had questions. But I guess he actually heard my tone—because instead of arguing, he shifted straight into business mode.

“Copy that,” he said, already moving. “What’s going on?”

“Something’s kriffed with the station,” I said, taking the most direct route to explaining. “Mental domination. Think really subtle mind control. It’s happening inside the station, not outside, so you should be safe in orbit.”

Another pause. Then: “Okay. And why, exactly, are you not evacuating?”

I grit my teeth, flipping through security door overrides as we ran. “Because it’s not the station doing it. It’s the core of a giant droid—the same kind from Malachor V.”

I could feel the frustration in the silence that followed.

“Jake,” Tarek finally said, voice tight, “remind me why we’re not just blowing this whole place to hell?”

Fair question.

“We’re on a timer,” I said, rounding a corner. “Same deal as Malachor. Back then, we lasted long enough to function, and that’s all we need now—time to destroy the crystal core before it screws us over. If we can’t, then we evac, get on the Stellar Envoy, and glass the whole place.”

I could hear Tarek still thinking it over, still piecing things together. And then, at the worst possible time, I let slip:

“Besides, this place is really nice.”

Tarek exhaled hard. “You are not risking your life because the station has a good view.”

“It’s more than the view, Tarek,” Rina cut in, annoyed. “The whole place is a fully functional research facility. This thing’s got working production facilities, mining equipment—”

“—a factory,” I emphasized, dodging a loose conduit. “We can build things here, Tarek. Real things. I could actually try making exo-suits, maybe even power armor—”

Tarek cut me off. “So you’re telling me that last time, you described this whole crystal mind kriff as ‘madness and heart-stopping fear,’ and now, you wanna stay inside the kriffing haunted research station because it has a factory?”

I winced. “…When you say it like that, it sounds bad.”

“Because it is bad!”

“Hold on, hold on,” Mira interjected. “It’s not the same as Malachor. This crystal already has cracks. We don’t have to win against it—we just need to finish breaking it.”

“Yeah,” Davik added. “It’s already halfway destroyed. One good hit, and it’s done.”

Tarek, to his credit, was already launching the Stellar Envoy, despite arguing. I could hear the hum of the ship’s engines spooling up over the comm. He was just pissed that we were staying behind to do something stupid.

Which, fair.

I wasn’t gonna argue that this wasn’t stupid. It was. Very.

But kark it, this station was too good to lose. Nobody else even knew it existed. Which meant that if we played this right, it was up for the taking. Our taking.

We just had to break one stupid crystal.

Oh, and not get killed in the process.

That part was important.

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The group arrives at the security office:

First things first—we had to lock down the security droids.

“Last thing we need is them going berserk,” I muttered, pulling up the command terminal as we hit the security office. “Even if they don’t see us as intruders, they might still interpret us trying to smash the Kyber crystal as ‘destroying the station.’”

Kado frowned. “But we are destroying part of the station.”

I waved a hand. “Yeah, but I’d like to avoid a ‘stop or be terminated’ situation.”

A few keystrokes later, I brought up the security droid activation protocols. And... yeah. Just as I thought. The moment the station sensed a ‘compromise to critical systems,’ the droids were primed to activate.

“Okay, we got options,” I said, scanning the screen. “One, we delay their activation. Two, we restrict their access to certain zones. Three, we just, y’know... turn them off.”

Davik pointed. “Three.”

Rina nodded. “Yeah, three.”

Mira shrugged. “Why not all three?”

“…Fair point.”

A few more keystrokes, and—done. Security droids were locked down. No auto-activation, no mobilization, no sudden ‘terminate all hostiles’ orders.

One problem down.

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With that handled, it was time for the real plan.

“So, funny idea,” I said, spinning back toward the others. “What if instead of just breaking the Kyber crystal, we first stick it in something?”

Mira frowned. “Like what?”

“A containment box.”

Rina narrowed her eyes. “Explain.”

I gestured vaguely. “Look, the biggest problem with this karking thing is its aura, yeah? Its whole ‘subtle corrupting influence’ thing? We already know it’s cracked, but if it’s still strong enough to mess with us, maybe it’s the exposure that’s the problem.”

Kado crossed his arms. “So you’re suggesting... what? We stuff it in a box and hope it stops being evil?”

I snapped my fingers. “Not just any box—a containment box.”

Mira looked thoughtful. “If we build something that could block the crystal’s influence, even just temporarily... it could buy us time to figure out the safest way to destroy it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Instead of rushing in half-cocked and swinging at it, we get it in a controlled environment. If the containment box actually works? We carry it off the station and shatter it somewhere far away from anything valuable.”

Davik arched a brow. “And if the box doesn’t work?”

I shrugged. “Then we smash it the old-fashioned way and run like hell.”

Rina sighed. “I hate that our backup plan is ‘run like hell.’”

“You’re gonna hate it even more when we actually have to do it.”

Despite the tension, I grinned.

This was risky.

This was stupid.

But if we pulled it off? We’d get a fully operational research station, a hidden base, and—possibly—an answer to the question of why these crystals kept turning droids into Sith-crazed murder machines.

And that? That was worth the gamble.