EAST OF EDEN ( anakin s. ) ✔️

021 | The Serpent's Call..

━━━━━━ ༻ 🌄 ༺ ━━━━━━
" the serpent's call "
...
━━━ ༻ CHAPTER TWENTY ONE ༺ ━━━

          "WHY IS SHE BANDAGED?"

In that particular corridor's narrowness, suffocation was no longer a matter personal prowess, but instead a dooming certainty that would by all means start long before the victim even stepped foot on Byetin's merciless soil. It would start, this feeling of unpleasant crowdedness, as far back as glimpsing at the blue-white flicker of the Homi star, because as soon as that glimmer of ghostly warning came into sight, one would meet the might of a blockade as tightly knitted together as a paranoid general behind the planning had seen it fit. 

Every planet was of some importance to the Confederacy of Independent Systems. The first planet from Homi, Kon, was acting as their graveless cemetery, where the surface heat amongst the rocky landscape trapped in utter stillness in a perpetual uncorrupted balance of day or night, decayed at impressive speed enemies of their cause, as well all defective equipment, conveniently off record. 

It was the third planet from the star which was the bounty hunter's destination. Byetin. A giant unforgiving desert, spreading for miles on end under a sky that at times would blend with the endless dunes. Before one of its giant everlasting storms brushed over a zone, the sky would turn olive green, sickened to look down upon the surface habitable only for hideous monsters, a surface with temperatures high enough to make the few natural reserves of water an absolute luxury, thus turning any unfortunate organic visitors a red flaring target asking to be sucked dry of any moisture. 

Those merciless plains acted as the perfect last barrier of defense to the Animus Post, a metal monstrosity hidden far beneath the sand. Switching back to manual, the bounty hunter lifted his hands lazily from his lap to place them on the controls. Each planet, apart from the graveyard, had a filtering station controlling traffic in and off planet. Those round gigantic structures would shoot down any vessel that does not first pass through their control. Of course, the system was not unbeatable, but it really did not have to be, at least not for Byetin, where the control station moved at the same time with the storm on surface, permanently guarding the clear side of the planet.

No one would be crazy enough to go through the Byetin Storm in order to land. 

No one without clearance would be crazy enough to stray this far into the Separatist sector to begin with. Not even the Republic was brave enough to interfere with the business in the Homi system anymore, though they were naturally aware these seven planets acted as the engine to the whole CIS might.

"Follow the coordinates transmitted," a clearly droid-generated voice spoke into the bounty hunter's ship, a relic of the Grange transporter line that had seen better days back when the exports off the agricultural world actually meant something to the galaxy. "You will have a ten minutes window to the BX7 hangar entrance." Following the directions towards which the bounty hunter delivered no acknowledgment or confirmation, the Grange transporter was allowed entrance past the barricade. 

BX7 waited for him open on the surface, a large hole through which the ship descended into the heart of the Animus Post, the home of the paranoid heart that built the defenses of the Homi System by merely giving brutal orders. Those orders reflected themselves right into the rough edged construction of the base; amidst that cold and badly lit place, a maze of tall roofed corridors that occasionally branched into matchbox shaped rooms, often just deposits, the bounty hunter did not fret to answer the question he was addressed, not immediately.