[center]~| Day 3, 17:45 - 17:55 GST |~[/center]
                                                   [center]~|Location: In orbit of Tatooine|~[/center]

Fa-Val-Kuul was aboard a civilian freighter currently filled above the recommended capacity with refugees, mostly from Balmorra. Technically, she was on leave, but thanks to her squad leader, Vebra, she was not expecting much R&R this time around. Of course, she did not [i]have[/i] to join him, but the case he had made was just a bit too strong to refuse. She hoped he was correct, because this whole trip aboard an overcrowded rustbucket of a ship had really begun to cause her patience to wear thin. 

Suddenly, Fa heard a soft beep from one of the pouches on her belt. She and her squad leader were trying to remain low-profile, so her armor was safely locked away with most of her weapons, apart from her sonic blaster. She wore only a tool belt, from which she pulled her datapad and checked the message from Vebra. He needed to meet her in private, which could actually be somewhat difficult aboard this ship. Luckily, most of the refugees congregated in either their rooms, or the common area, where she was currently waiting. He wanted her to go one of the maintenance corridors, so she calmly put away the datapad and headed towards her bunk before cutting left down a different hall, taking the long way around to Vebra.

Vebra glanced back and forth across the small bare bone corridor that ran adjecent to one of the other hallways that lead to the mess hall. Confident that no one else was in the corridor with him he grabbed a hold of a metal panel on the the wall and lifted up and two the side. There was a little bit of force required to make the panel actually slide away as the steam in the tunnels that was given off by the oxygen recyclers on the ship which he assumed were ancient at this point. The panel revealed a red cylinder with multiple ports on it which went from the somewhere below the floor to somewhere much higher above him. This communication antennae should be able to squawk to the other ships in orbit, he just needed Fa to get here, she was better with these things than he was. Though he was beginning to wonder if his message got through.

He pulled back his white guantlets and let his dark brown robes fall back over his armor. While it was quite a bit hotter in these matinence corridors than the rest of the grimey ship his modified trooper armor was doing a rather good job of keeping him cool. Not that it bothered him much anyways, he was a zabrak after all. He pulled his robes hood down from his head being careful not to rip them on his horns and reached back into the small opening with one arm. He quickly found the lever he was looking for and pulled it towards him. There was a noise that sounded as if the antennae was priming. When he pulled his arm back out he heard the light footsteps of Fa on the thin metal walkway. He turned down the corridor and saw his lizard companion. He nodded slightly and said in a voice barely audible over the loud machinery that filled the ship "Think you can get me a secure line out?" Pointing towards the opening.

Fa did not immediately answer Vebra, instead walking up to the panel and looking inside just to see what he was actually talking about. She pulled out her datapad, then looked between it and the components inside the opening, which she assumed to be part of the communications array based on what he was asking. "Well, I'm not a slicer, sir. I doubt I can do much better than you." She began, trailing off as she leaned in to get a closer look at the array. Despite her words, she did have at least a moderate familiarity with technology, thanks to her experience in tracking targets on more urban worlds. Hacking a secure system was beyond her reach, but thankfully, security did not seem to be a major focus on this freighter. 

"Let's see...well, this thing doesn't exactly have military grade security. Or much security at all, really. I can't plug into any of these ports directly, but I might be able to splice right into the wiring behind them. I can probably get you a line, but I don't think [i]secure[/i] should be anywhere in your vocabulary." Fa answered. She had already began trying to loosen one of the ports to get at the wiring behind it; if the security was as outdated as she expected, then she already had a program on her datapad from a previous assignment that could help give them what they needed.

As Fa got to work on the comms situation Vebra leaned his back against the wall blocking Fa from sight atleast on one side, smiling at the humbleness of his subordinate. He reached down and lightly grasped his beshkab which was hanging at his hip. He then hoped that the refugees hadn't broken into his locker and stolen his rifle and helmet. He would be rather angry if such a thing were to occur. But he supposed he couldn't blame them. Most of them were refugees from the now war torn imperial controlled world of Balmorra. Having just come from there after killing yet another sith apprentiace before the war ran out he understood their situation far too well.

Even with the official end to the war and the planet being given up in concessions to the Empire the Republic the fighting never stopped. Even the commanders on the world refused to stop fighting and were now organizing resistance forces against a juggernaut of an enemy. Officially his squad was being pulled off world by command to begin training new recruits. Though when he heard Lyric's message he hopped on the first boat to Tatooine, telling his superiors he was going for some R&R there. While being reluctant to agree they knew he hadn't been rotated for close to 18 months and if he was a regular trooper he would be well past his average burn out time. Fa was luckily in a similar position, being that she was the only trooper he had that wasn't either killed or bumped up to leader of another squad he did make his case to her. After all, if they were going on a suicide mission it was best to bring atleast someone he could order around. While he trusted the Jedi he had found out the hard way that disagreeing with them could be complicated.

To be honest this was atleast up until now mostly relaxing. Granted a food riot had broken out at one point but it was quickly put to a stop when the captain of the ship threatened to vent the ships atmoshpere. He had managed to catch the first full night of sleep in weeks this previous night considering he wasn't in constant danger for once. Though this rickety freighter seemed like it was older than his grandfather but one would struggle to find much better when fleeing a planet that has been at war for so long. Now though he was just concerned that the captured Jedi would be able to last until they got there. It had been three days after all, knowing what he knew about Sith torture tactics....Vebra cleared his mind of the thought quickly with the soothing calm of the force.

"Hopefully Lyric still uses the old frequency from Balmorra the sentimental old nerf herder." Vebra pulled back his robe and opened up the small data pad on the underside of his fore arm, almost opening the old message containing the frequency. Deciding against it he brought his arm back into his large robes and looked around once again waiting for Fa to give him the all clear.

Fa came close to getting the port loose with her claws, though she did have to grab one tool from her belt to finish it off. Claws could be surprisingly good multitools, but her [i]actual[/i] multitool gave more immediate results. Once that was finished, she was able to splice the wiring directly to a specialized slot on her datapad, bypassing the need for an adapter. From there, she had to get her datapad to be recognized at a maintenance device. Luckily, there was only light, outdated security, so one of the scripts she had used to perform a similar task in the past worked for this purpose as well. 

"Hmm, I don't know if I would call him sentimental as much as too lazy to actually bother changing it." Fa commented with a light chuckle. Her datapad had the access it needed, so she navigated through to the screen where Vebra could select the frequency to attempt to hail, then looked up to him and offered him the device. "Here, just enter the frequency, and hit broadcast. It will take a few seconds for the array to fire up, but if there is anyone in range on that frequency, they'll hear it."

Once he took the datapad, Fa stood up and gave him a quick, serious look. "Though, I'll remind you that this is [i]not[/i] a secure channel, so...keep it quick, and preferably vague." She warned, taking over his role as lookout.  Honestly, she did not particularly like how they were going about this, being that they were acting outside of official Republic authority. But, this business with the treaty was not something that sat well with her in the slightest. She did not care how much the Republic's hand had been forced, she could not stand to let the Sith end the war on their terms. "So, Lyric...I know we've fought with him more than a few times, but how much do you think we can trust him with this? It's pretty serious, what he wants to do."

Vebra contorted his lips to the left slightly for a moment at Fa handed him the data pad. "It'll do." he began going through his head searching through which frequency he would have most likely used. He wondered if he still remembered the comm channel from the river they got bogged down in once, that was a fun fight. Then again so was the 12 hour long fire fight after it. These memories brought a small smile to Vebra's face, the imps had been good warriors on occasion.

"I trust Lyric with my life, excellent fighter and firm in his beliefs. Even if they conflict with me. Back before this squad is even offical I fought with the man, never before have I met a lazier Jedi. Adore the man even though he smokes the worst cigarra brand I've ever tasted." Vebra gave out a slight chuckle and had the taste of those cigarras invade his mouth once again. "Though knowing what the Sith do to Jedi I couldn't rightly sit knowing what they will do to them. There are things worse than death. We have a chance to do something about it, besides the treaty didn't collapse when they refused to give up Balmorra. I'm sure it will survive "hostage negotiations". If you have doubts about this you can stay on this frieghter or ditch me at the space port. We're off duty anyways I'll understand. But I would like to have someone watching my back." Vebra said with a bit of a light hearted attitude to help dampen the heavy topic.

Fa lightly shook her head. "You would be surprised how much harm someone can do just trying to do the right thing." She commented, gazing off down the empty corridor. She could not really pretend to know what the best course of action was in this situation. All around, nothing was close to ideal. From the moment she had joined up with the Republic, and even from her parents before that, she had been taught to follow orders, but now it seemed like the Republic was intent on giving up. No enemy, not even the Sith, was unbeatable, but there was no chance of coming out of the war victorious if they stopped trying to fight back. Fa knew she could hardly hope to turn the tide on her own, but Jedi were perhaps the best force multipliers in the galaxy. If she could help rescue even a few of them, that could have a pretty sizable impact.

Letting out an extended sigh, Fa gave Vebra a pat on the back. "But, I wouldn't be here if I didn't agree with you...that you need someone to watch your back, that is. I don't know how you ever managed to keep yourself alive without me." She joked. "Besides, I'll easily take an off-the-books suicide mission over leave on [i]Tatooine[/i] of all places. The latter is probably more deadly, from boredom, if nothing else."

Vebra smirked "If nearly three decades of war have taught me anything, it's that sometimes the best thing to do is the right thing. Besides even if all we rescue are a bunch of padawans the galaxy is going to be needing them a lot more soon then they'll need an old man like me." Vebra capped that off with a gruff chuckle. Who would have though he would get old? A washed out Jedi who was stupid enough to join up and fight the best organized group of soldiers left in the galaxy. He wasn't even the fastest or smartest or strongest in his training platoon. But he lived, very few of the crinking troopers did. Come to think of it there couldn't be more than 20 of them left in the galaxy. Funny how things fell the way they did.

"Though I do hear you on not wanting to stay on Tatooine. Only ever met one vaping sod who actually wanted to come here for leave. She ended up switching out to be a bomber pilot but man, weird kid."

Fa shrugged her shoulders. "Bomber pilot? Maybe the place gave her a fascination with wastelands, and she decided to go make more of them? Regardless, I'm not keen on staying here any longer than we have to. Though, I'm at least glad it's not a [i]frozen[/i] wasteland. I will appreciate the heat."

Vebra laughed, "You're telling a Zabrak that!"After going through several of the old channels he and Lyric used during their rotations he found one that wasn't pure static. The anteneas were unfortunately older than the force and would take a minute to line up. "Now we just gotta hope we arn't too late for the party." As the arrays creaked into place the signal cleaned up and Vebra simply used the microphone on the data pad to put out a quick blast over the comms "Vebra to Lyric, please tell me you use this channel still you lazy nerf herder." Vebra made sure to repeat this message two more times after a few seconds in between just to make sure it went through. Though he did change out the insult on the end every time.