Raey's nerves only became more frayed the closer to the planet's surface they got. Finally, the docking bay in sight and no excuse presenting itself, he slowed the fighter to a near-crawl and looked back at Ar'tak helplessly.

"Uh... we have a problem."

Ar'tak frowned. "More problems then landing smack in the middle of the First Order's huge planet-base, surrounded by people who would love to kill us?"

"No, actually, that is the problem I was talking about." Raey hesitated, clearing his throat. "I have never... exactly... landed a ship."

Silence. Dense, dense silence. Raey cleared his throat again.

"I've crashed a few without dying, which is arguably even more important, but if we want to avoid drawing attention to ourselves then, maybe, you should take the controls?"

Ar'tak blinked at Raey very deliberately. "I don't pilot ships, Raey. My specialty is sitting in the backseat and trying not to think about how easy it would be to smash into something and kill everyone aboard."

Raey turned back to his controls, forcing a growing sense of fear back down into the pit of his stomach. "It's fine. I know these ships inside and out... and landing isn't all that tricky. I just have to set the ship down nice and gentle... use a lot of nudges. We're going to do great."

"Nudge?"

"Quiet, Ar'tak. I need to concentrate."

.

Ar'tak slid down off the fighter, his blue skin ashen and his arms clutched close around his stomach. He didn't care if anyone saw him, but, fortunately for the Jedi, no one seemed to.

Raey climbed out of the hatch and jumped down after him, landing with an ooph of breath. While Ar'tak leaned against the wing, breathing hard, Raey ducked under the hull to check the landing gear.

"There is a bit of damage," he admitted after a moment. "It might be hard to get the landing gear to retract again, at any rate. Some of the parts are really jammed up in there--"

"Stop... talking," growled Ar'tak through gritted teeth. "You hairy no-color sand-walker... just stop talking."

"Hey, we're alive, aren't we?"

The look Ar'tak shot Raey was downright venomous, but Raey didn't let it bother him. He did feel that, when he had the time, he would have to reconsider his assumptions about the endurance of Jedi as a whole, though. Turned out the apprentices, at least, could still be pretty fragile.

He straightened and looked around the landing bay, assessing their situation. It looked pretty sparse for a massive space-base - only one other ship shared the entire hanger with them; a battered-looking cargo transport, unappealingly bulky and shapeless. A few people, dirty humans and aliens in work jumpers, moved around the transport, moving crates. One man in the black uniform of the First Order stood watching them, hands clasped behind his back. He didn't even glance in Raey's direction, though Raey was sure he had been when they first landed.

"We are scary acolytes," Raey muttered under his breath. "Or, Ar'tak is, and I'm his officer buddy. Don't make us mad."

Don't talk to yourself. It's unprofessional and will give you away in a heartbeat.

Or, that was what LN would say, if she was here. Already, Raey felt oddly exposed without her and her wonderful, wonderful blaster, but he tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that Ar'tak had a lightsaber.

"We should get moving," he said, turning to look at the Jedi again. Ar'tak still looked pale, but at least he wasn't hunched over anymore.

"Fine."

"Perhaps," Raey added more quietly, "we can find you some dark clothes somewhere. All that tan doesn't look very 'black acolyte', you know?"

"Whatever."

Raey hesitated mid-turn. He looked over his shoulder at the glowering apprentice.

"Are you alright?"

"Just peachy," growled Ar'tak. Raey noticed he was gripping the hilt of his lightsaber tightly enough for his blue knuckles to go white. "Let's get away from this deathtrap."

He marched past Raey, stiff and smoldering. Raey glanced back at the only-slightly-broken fighter, shrugged, and turned to follow.

"Where are we going?" he asked, quickening his pace to catch up to Ar'tak. "Are your Force senses pointing out a direction, showing you where Dameron is being held?"

"Right now, the Force isn't telling me much of anything, except that my companion is a terrible pilot."

"You really need to let that go. I did give you the chance to drive if you wanted to, and you didn't want to. Get over it."

Ar'tak grumbled, but when he spoke again he did change the subject. "My plan is to find a computer that you can hack into like you did on the station, and we find a map of the complex. Hopefully that will tell us where the prisoners are being held... or if there are prisoners being held here at all. Then you download the blueprints, we get back to the fighter, and get out of here."

The way he said all that, so matter-of-factly, made Raey suspect Ar'tak knew about as much about computers as he did about piloting a fighter. "That might help us get an area-map, but blueprints aren't usually just accessible from any old console."

"Can't you just get all the area-maps, then, and we can put them together later?"

"If we are looking to," Raey lowered his voice even further as they passed through the hanger bay doors into the corridor beyond, "blow this planet up, then we will need internal blueprints. Surface-level maps would only help us find our way around, but sabotaging an entire base requires-"

"Alright, fine, then we keep our eyes out for some other options while we try to break your Resistance friend out. If you come up with any plans, feel free to let me know."

"You're the one who 'sensed' something we were supposed to do down here..."

"The Force doesn't just point at things and say 'oh, go blow that up' or 'talk to that person over there'. You have to learn to trust your instincts, even if you're not sure what to do, and trust the Force to lead you right."

The more Ar'tak talked, the less Raey liked the sound of it. "Princess Leia taught you that?"

Ar'tak hesitated, then shrugged slightly. "Not exactly, but she doesn't exactly train Jedi, in the strict sense. One of my jobs is to organize and help translate these old Jedi manuscripts we find or are sent and..." He trailed off, hearing footsteps around the corner of the hall. Raey straightened his shoulders and wondered if he should have tried to get all the wrinkles out of his uniform.

A group of stormtroopers appeared up ahead, marching in time with one another in two straight lines. Raey saw Ar'tak sway as he began to step aside to let them pass, then the apprentice caught himself. He raised his chin slightly, and his gaze turned cold.

"Trooper!" he barked as the first two drew near. "I am here for the prisoners."

The stormtroopers stopped almost as one, and the two in front exchanged a look through their black and white helmets.

"On whose authority?" asked one, though Raey wasn't quite sure which. Ar'tak drew in a breath to reply, but Raey didn't wait - he stepped forward, glaring.

"On the authority of the Knights of Ren, soldier! My lord is a black acolyte, just returned from an undercover mission in order to personally interrogate the Resistance captive. If you cannot lead us there, then find me someone who can!"

The trooper saluted. "My apologies, sir, but with all the personnel transfers lately, I can't be sure where anyone is being kept. If there are prisoners aboard Starkiller Base, your masters would be the ones to know."

Raey glanced at Ar'tak, not sure how to proceed.

"Carry on, then," Ar'tak said, turning away in a fair attempt at scornful dismissal. All the same, Raey could feel the stormtroopers watching them out of the corner of their visors as he and Ar'tak walked past them down the hall.

"That didn't go well," he muttered once they were out of earshot. Ar'tak raised a hand, fiddled nervously with the spike at the end of one of his chagrian head-tentacles.

"We should hurry. This doesn't feel right."

Raey peered in at every door they passed, but most looked unfinished – just filled with storage boxes or unattached wires where electronics would someday go. Raey couldn't help but go peek inside a few of them, but the plates of metal inside were too heavy, and looked too plain, to slip in a pocket. He couldn't think of any practical use for them in the moment, either, so he just left them. Finally, though, he found one room with a connected computer and pulled Ar'tak inside.

"Keep watch," he ordered, and accessed the console.

Area-maps were hardly restricted data, but to Raey's dismay all that showed up were docking bays, storage rooms, and barracks marked "labor". After some exploring, he found the sector map, then backed out into a map of sectors.

"Gotcha."

Labor, military, command. He narrowed in on sectors marked 'command', figuring that is where the higher-security situations were dealt with. In the process, he discovered the tram system used to get around the planet-sized base.

He bit the inside of his lip thoughtfully, navigating out of the maps. "Transfer logs..."

Inaccessible from this low-level terminal.

But there was a real control room on the way to the nearest tram...

"I've got a plan."

"Ar'tak..."

"We can't bluff our way through this one, Raey."

"But... LN..."

"Sometimes, a Jedi has to do hard things, and not everyone is going to agree with those things. LN isn't here to bluff her way through, so we have to do it ourselves."

Raey had no answer for him. He stood still, his thoughts racing for a solution as Ar'tak walked alone into the control room.

Indignant voices rose in protest, only to be interrupted by the hum of a lightsaber. Moments later, the exclamations turned into screams.

Raey slipped quietly into the room, trying not to look at the uniformed corpses littering the ground. Ar'tak stood to one side, his shoulders slumped despite the surety he had apparently felt outside.

It could have been LN.

Raey stepped over a man with greying brown hair, lying face-down with his back sliced open by Ar'tak's lightsaber. Same black clothes, the uniform of the First Order, as everyone else in the room, but Raey was wearing that same uniform. LN had worn that uniform.

He focused on the terminal in front of him. Personnel transfer logs.

Workers, under a half-dozen different company names, listed as both arriving and departing in shifts over the last couple days. Raey knew none of the companies, so he glanced past them quickly. More deliberate and detailed were officer names, trooper squads. Most of them were marked as departures.

Something was going on.

There! A group arrival from the Resurrection within the last few hours. There were two names listed in the record, both marked by a bold title next to the title Knight. Kylo Ren (Raey read it with an involuntary shiver) and Soro'Mok. Two Knights, with a party of three accompanying them. Acolytes? Or... acolytes and a prisoner.

"Found it!"

Raey took note of the landing bay number, then cross-referenced it with the sector maps. He located the holding cells nearest the bay, then brought up the tram schedule.

"I've got it all, Ar'tak."

Ar'tak nodded, but he did not reply. The motion sickness caused by Raey's less-then-stellar landing had passed long ago, but he looked just as pale now as when he had crawled out of that cockpit.

Raey didn't know what to say to him, so he didn't say anything at all. He grabbed a datapad from the loose grasp of a dead officer and began downloading the maps he needed.

When he left the room, Ar'tak followed, silent and brooding.

What if we encounter the Knights?

Raey didn't say it out loud. He would have, but Ar'tak would think it was meant for him. Raey knew his companion didn't have any answer, anymore then Raey himself did.

.

.

The acolytes stood on either side of the door like guards, their hoods low and casting their faces into shadow. They waited patiently, unable to hear anything that went on on the other side of the locked, reinforced door.

But they could guess.

The mechanism hissed, the door slid open. Their Knight strode out of a deathly quiet black room, his tattooed face twisted in a wicked smile of anticipation.

"Someone has arrived ahead of schedule," he said, flicking fresh blood from his pale, bare fingers. "Retrieve my armor from the ship - the Knight of Passion is going hunting."