"Atmosphere in cockpit dropping, flight suits containing enough oxygen for 4 minutes. In the name of the Empire I demand I be allowed to deliver this message Immediately." he spoke urgently, as if a man who was facing death (and to some extent, he was), he looked out through the blacked out cockpit window, watching and waiting for a result. His clearance code would check out, Pilot Officer Higgins was assigned to the Imperial base at Anaxes, it was not implausible that a courier would be sent from that Imperial hub.

Out of hyperspace on the opposite side of Volus from the Avenger-class, the Gamma-class shuttle dropped from hyperspace, scanning the area in its vicinity for nearby vessels to raid or capture. Reports would begin tickering in to the Admiral of the fleet within a minute of this new vessels presence.

But, as the starfighter had begun losing oxygen precipitously, there could be little doubt that it was, indeed, in distress. The Admiral said so to Lyons, then glanced to the Captain Wilks of the Avenger, about to instruct him to pull the ARC-170 in for assistance. Then, the report of the new vessel that had arrived on the other side of the planet unannounced and unexpected on a vector that was rarely used commercially. The Admiral's suspicions had only just been aroused when, suddenly, a realization struck him.

"Ensign," he said, turning to the communications console once more, "Transmit the following message to the starfighter."

"But Sir," the Captain Wilks said behind him, "What of the Gamma-class vessel?"

"In a moment," Hurd said, patiently. He nodded to the Ensign as he spoke the message to him. "'Flight Officer Hanks, please transmit your identification code.'" The Ensign raised an eyebrow in confusion, then understood. Indeed, the pilot of the starfighter had originally identified himself as 'Hanks,' but his identification code was for 'Higgins.' Hurd was surprised he hadn't noticed at first either. He turned to Lyons and explained the discrepancy to him, then asked, "Are you accustomed to receiving messages in this manner, Captain?"

"Admiral?" Wilks reminded him.

Hurd held a finger to Lyons, begging the officer's pardon as he glanced at Wilks. "Traffic control is hardly our responsibility," he said. "Have ground monitor it, and if it does anything unusual tell them to give us a shout." Wilks did so, and Hurd returned his attention to Lyons.

While he wondered about the new vessel, he'd felt it better to focus his attention on "Flight Officer Hanks" for the time being, and soon Lyons came to stand beside the Admiral, arms folded at his chest. "I don't like this... not one bit."

((OOC Note: Since Higgins is a relatively minor character in all this, I felt it was plausible enough that Lyons could have known him from a past assignment. Not to mention that, there's no reason this resistance group on Dantooine should have any idea of his status or whereabouts, thus the matter of filling in the character's background should be left to the Imperial character, who'd have more knowledge of what exactly happened to him.))

Tristan Lyons
Captain of the Inherent Justice

Six SpaceTroopers launched from their berths aboard the ship and began powering across the void. Towards the container vessel haplessly energy harpooned, while a score of other boarders began to launch towards it.

The Z-95 jumped to hyperspace, having drawn away much of the Volusian fighter escort and one of the Corvettes.

Detecting the ploy failing, the pilot opened his canopy, activating the vessel's sensor jammer as he did so, allowing Ka-Dek to slip out in the small cloud of gas. He then made a desperate gambit, performing a detailed pirate manoeuvre he powered the engines to full power at the same time as jinking the vessel, this technique was often effective at shaking free from a tractor beam, he attempted to turn the vessel about, and simultaneously the rear gunner began firing on the tractor beam generator.

As this happened the onboard R2 unit began to seal the canopy.

As he exited he used the force to aid his speed (made easy from the weightlessness afforded by zero-gravity) as he sped upwards from the ship a goodly distance, dressed in the black of deep space and with sensors jamming his sensor presence, he would appear almost invisible against the pastiche of the stars as he set himself on a course to head away from the scene, but so that after around 45 minutes or so, Volus' natural gravity would begin to pull him back and eventually bring him in contact with the station holding the avenger-class. Once he had a reasonable speed he ceased using the force to add momentum, and instead began to extend his feelings out towards the ship.. attempting to detect and sense any directing their attention towards him.

The fighters also painted targeting solutions on the stricken civilian freighter's sublight engines and repulsorlifts, in the event that the ship may be captured by the pirates and used to escape. The civilian freighter was, all the while, being instructed by ground control to remain where it was, close and lock all of its doors, blast doors, cargo bays, etc., and wait for assistance. The command crew of the freighter, in fact, took it a bit farther—watching the boarding party advance through the ship on holocameras, they made a point of closing the heavy doors on them unexpectedly as they passed. It was yet another gruesome way to die for the pirates. That, and being crushed to death by tons of cargo as the artificial gravity would be turned off—allowing the pirates and the cargo to float free—and then turned back on, bringing it all tumbling to the deck in a thunderous roar of heavy cargo crates and screams.

The other corvette, meanwhile, would arrive in a moment.

Hurd was told of these developments, but didn't give them undue attention. His ships would do what they could and didn't need his direction. He was much more interested in the strange development before him. The Admiral recognized the starfighter's attempt to shake itself free of the tractor lock, but opening the canopy was curious. It wasn't a part of the tactic that he had observed before, unless the oxygen itself was meant as a "shroud" to confuse the tractor beam? No, of course not, oxygen wouldn't register on a tractor beam's targeting sensor. Or, Hurd thought, had he supposed too soon? For at that moment, the ARC-170 did indeed appear to break free from the lock...

"Dammit!" said Dwight Hidges, a civilian contractor tasked with operating the tractor beam that happened to hold the ARC-170 starfighter in place. As soon as the starfighter's canopy had opened, Hidges's targeting sensor lost the lock. First, the fighter itself seemed to flicker in and out of existence on sensors. Then it appeared to become two flickering objects, and, as was often the case when a "shroud" is improvised, the tractor beam locked instead on the new object. It was a much smaller object, and something that Hidges couldn't see on his visual display amid the cloud of vented oxygen. But no matter. There was no time to release it, whatever it was, and acquire a new lock, so he simply left it where it was and switched to one of the other dozens of previously mentioned tractor beam projectors that had already been aimed at the starfighter and re-acquired the lock. "Not so fast," Hidges grumbled triumphantly to himself.

... and, with a heavy jolt, the ARC-170 remained where it was. Hurd raised an eyebrow. He didn't have time to do much else, though, before the first shot was fired. Dammit, the Admiral thought to himself, Someone is nervous. Indeed, upon seeing the fighter's sudden maneuver, one of the Avenger's gunners lost his nerve and opened fire. The shot happened to miss, but the rest of the Avenger's gunnery deck took this as their cue to fire. And they did. The ARC-170 would already be subjected to a ruthless pounding before Hurd could say "Cease firing." (calmly, to give Lyons the impression, perhaps, that it had been deliberate. Hurd had no desire to appear unprofessional in front of the liaison officer).

This was becoming an eventful day, the Admiral thought. Too eventful for his taste.

Meanwhile, Dwight Hidges, stunned at the starfighter's probable destruction, would run his hands through his hair, shake his head, and turn his attention to that other object. The other object that was now gone amid what was probably a cloud of debris from the ARC-170. Odd, Hidges thought. There had been something there, surely? In that fraction of an instant while the sensors seemed to be struggling to pick up anything at all. But now it was impossible to tell. Perhaps it had been a piece of debris that Hidges hadn't seen in the instant before the starfighter was pummeled. He might never know.

Assuming the fighter was destroyed, Hidges would go to work with the other tractor beam operators to hold the largest pieces of debris in place and prevent them from scraping against the hull of the Avenger, or its construction scaffolding.

Ka-Dek just drifted through the void silently and invisible to sensors, some hours later his drift would take him towards the station, he wept a silent tear as he saw the explosions.. again a jedi was responsible for death.

The captain of the gamma-class lost his shit as he detected fighters and such approaching his position, breaking the tether with the fighter and heading away from the scene a minute before the arrival of the freighter, with this lead he headed back to the jump point, having his gunners cover him, he had to get out of here, he wasnt going to die. "GAME OVER MAN, GAME OVER" he moaned over the comm to the rest of the ship.

The boarders did their best to avoid the various traps etc, blasting into the vessel as close as possible to the bridge. The space troopers blasting into the main hangar and proceeding inside as soon as possible (before the 5 minutes was up) instead of suicidally floating in space and then seeking to procede through corridors to critical systems. Closing interior doors on what were effectively tanks was not dramatically effective, with the powered arms of the suit simply allowing one trooper to help another as they operated in pairs, each followed by a few regular borders.

The ones who boarded near the bridge were less lucky, and had to avoid the doors after one was horribly crushed to death "Theyre fighting awfully hard for civillians, this seems like a setup" said one, and truly it was odd, why would civilians risk death or torture to inflict a few horrific deaths on boarders instead of just ejecting from the vessel? It was just cargo, and presumably they were insured.

This said, they would procede very quickly in the five minutes, storming through with the aid of a few dantooine crew's abilities to short circuit doors in their way, or failing that others with breeching charges, aiming now to take some hostages to allow their escape.

Heavy blast doors were, in fact, more of a danger to the space troopers than they might have assumed. It was said that "assuming makes an 'ass' of 'you' and 'me,'" but in this case it made an ass only of the unfortunate space trooper who found himself gruesomely crushed by his own armor and then bisected by closing blast doors to the horror of his fellow boarders, many of whom not even possessing the formidable spacetrooper armor but, rather, simple vacsuits. The rest of the boarders would find it rather hard even to short circuit the doors with the gravity being turned on and off. That and, on one occasion, the gravity was turned off and the corridor in which one group of boarders was temporarily confined was pressurized with oxygen. Then, a door behind them was opened, sending them all hurtling back in the direction they'd come as the air rushed them back down the corridor. The door was then closed again, further delaying them. It was possible to delay the boarders almost indefinitely in this manner, but it wasn't necessary to delay them indefinitely—the crew knew that the Volusians would arrive presently.

And indeed they did. The boarding party, or what remained of it, reached the command bridge at about the same moment as the corvette reached the freighter. The crew of the freighter, their tricks exhausted, put up no resistance except to shut down the ship's navigations, engines, etc. requiring a few, long moments to turn them back on. Not that it mattered, with the corvette there to shoot the engines out precisely at the first sign of fleeing. The crew of the freighter had put up more of a fight than an average crew might have, perhaps, but it was of course possible that the pirates had simply chosen, through no fault of their own, the worst possible ship to board, with a most intrepid crew.

As soon as it became clear that the freighter had been hijacked, the corvette jammed its transmission. They would not listen to pirates, or negotiate with them. With a terse message sent to the freighter on the only channel that was left available to it, the Volusians urged the pirates to surrender and, some time later, dispatched a boarding party of marines to reclaim the ship.

Work, meanwhile, had resumed on the Avenger. It was a bustling construction site, with zero-G droids and workers in vacsuits floating about the scaffolding that enveloped the ship. And it was alive with light—the viewports of the Avenger cast their fluorescent glow into space, sparks flew from welding around the hull, and spotlights illuminated the entire construction site from the scaffolding above. Ka Dek would be spotted almost the moment he drifted onto this scene (in fact, most likely before it, as the sensor jamming would suddenly render all of the tractor beams useless in Ka Dek's vicinity, not to mention the zero-G construction droids having no means of navigation. One of them almost collided with the Jedi Master, in fact). The disturbance having been noted, and the Avenger remaining on alert because of the ARC-170 incident and also the hijacking, all eyes turned to Ka Dek's black suited form as spotlights were trained upon it.

- Love Karth

Both sides in the freighter standoff acted with abandon; the more extreme of the rebels, having fortified themselves with drugs, took up positions around the ship's reactor, ready to destroy it and, with it, the entire ship, and the Volusians refused the rebel demand for free passage as well as the warning not to board the freighter, and boarded it anyway. Predictably, the rebels destroyed the reactor, and the engine block of the ship exploded mightily. The Volusian boarders—three or four in total, who had no reason to suspect that these rebels were suicidal—were killed, as were most of the rebels. It had become a tragic day over Volus, but as the day came to a close it could not be said that they acted as they shouldn't have.

The tragedy wasn't over yet, however. On the other side of the planet, Ka Dek put up little resistance as men in vacsuits with guns directed him to an airlock on the Avenger, where a security team had been quickly assembled. But once inside, the Jedi Master, too, acted with abandon as he ignited his lightsaber and cut down three, four, five Volusians before they overcame their surprise and panic and subdued him with stun blasts. Once Ka Dek was identified as what he obviously was, a Jedi, the Avenger and other orbital facilities over Volus were closed down, security redoubled, and the Empire promptly notified. No doubt, Inquisitor Rath Deschain would be briefed on the Jedi's capture as the Inquisitor was already on his way to the planet.

The incident would not remain his knowledge alone, however. With the number of Volusians killed, it was only a matter of time before word of the Jedi's presence, and capture, would spread first among the Volusian ranks, then the Volusian people and media, and then, of course, the galactic media. Many members of the Volusian government would put as positive a spin on the incident as possible, noting that Volus had done the impossible; captured a Jedi. This, combined with words of tribute and mourning for the Volusians that Ka Dek had killed, and those killed in the freighter explosion, assured that Jedi were decidedly unpopular on Volus today.