[right][h3][b]B[/b]eck - The Jundland Wastes[/h3][/right][hr]

“I heard they’ll rot your lungs out eventually.”

“If I live that long I’ll take it up with myself then,” Beck retorted crisply. “Give myself a good hollering in the fresher mirror.” 

Beck chewed at the cigarra as he looked out on the distant sandstorm, looming in the background behind the Jundland Waste’s pillars and trenches of towering rock faces. The hover train weaved between a pair of the things and Jeeda guided the skiff with it, coming all too close to smashing them apart on the rock. Odds were he wouldn’t be living that long. 

“Careful, Jeeda!” he shouted. The Rodian shrugged, and Beck shook his head, looking to the motley crew of mercenaries Doga had purchased for the job. He knew some of them, worked with some of them, but there were some new faces. Jeeda, for one. And the woman with no name. He’d heard of her, which was something, given that she didn’t have a name. He’d heard she was good with a gun, which he reckoned must be true, from the way she thumbed the butt of the slugthrower on her belt. Confident.

All the same, he was looking to be the leader of this merry band of backwater soldiers, and he figured he ought to act like it. “Any of us survives a crash is only bound to die in the sandstorm,” he announced. Something plinked hard against the skiff’s lightly armored fore, leaving a fresh dent in the durasteel construction. He paid it no mind. A rock, likely. “So hold on tight, eh?” Plink, again. And then another. And this time Beck heard the report of a distant gunshot. 

Not rocks. Slugs. 

“On the left!” Jeeda shouted in high pitched Huttese, seemingly realizing what was happening as Beck did. Beck wheeled around, shoulders hunched, bringing the Czerka cycler to bear and looking for a target amount the passing rocks. He heard returning fire, closer by, from the mercenaries aboard the hover train, and shouts. 

“Sand people!” a train-bound mercenary shouted over the din of engines, gunshots, and screams, taking a shot at an intricately featured wall pitted with cracks and crevices that seemed entirely vacant of any enemy. Except, of course, for the fact that the wall shot back. Beck could make out the muzzle flash of a slugthrower, wielded by an expertly camouflaged shooter, followed by a sharp crack. Beck aimed and fired, putting a hole in something that may have been a sand person, may have been a rock. 

“Keep your heads down and shoot!” Beck shouted to the crew, and fired again.